Re-capping A Motherboard

TMTGTR

TMTGTR

Back in May, my main DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) died. A P4 XP SP3 that I picked up off the street around 2009. I had extensively tweaked it to optimal performance for it's assigned task so no internet abilities and stripped shells.

I began to research options (Money too tight to mention). I did a visual inspection of the board and noticed swelled caps by the CPU. Did much research and had a successful outcome.

Anyone interested in my odyssey:
Need Advice On Which Caps To Buy For Dell Dimension 8300 Motherboard
https://www.badcaps.net/forum/showthread.php?t=106703
A valuable resource for a newbie to step by step attempt a MOBO recap.
 
Very cool post. I am glad you made it and your computer is working.

I have my old desktop (Asus Maximus III board) now sitting in the corner.
Bad NIC on board. Too bad it looks too hard to replace it :/ That computer was damn
decent.. Very low DPC latency, it was my gaming rig as well..

Im now using refurbished HP Elite 8200. Works very well. Its not gaming rig tho.
DPC latency is.. okish tho.
 
Could it not be rescued by using a USB, or PCIE connected NIC?
I guess latency might suffer, wonder by how much though.
 
Borg said:
Too bad it looks too hard to replace it :/ .
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I'll be honest, I was s**ting my pants and did the process in 3 separate sessions. The reality of that MOBO not working was very depressing. It was the single biggest electronics job I ever did.

At some point I realized, I "Got nothing to lose" and I came to realize that what was so daunting to me, was bread and butter to so many others. This gave me a little confidence.

The guys at badcaps.net are the best (present company excluded) forum people I have ever come across in terms of patience and frankly the value $ of the advice they offer. Many pros go there to admittedly work on commercial projects and are helped along.

If you've got nothing to lose...
 
USB NIC? for long term use? nah.. That mobo have USB 2.0 only ports also.
Stability and peformance is a must.

Well, I got used to that HP 8200.. I even bought nVidia GT 730 2GB GDDR5 vid card
so I can play my basic games. It did worked pretty ok. Even Stalker works nice, on DX8
settings tho (no nice dynamic lighting).

And good news is, I have exacly same one sitting in the corner for spare parts ;)
 
TMTGTR said:
Back in May, my main DAW (Digital Audio Workstation) died. A P4 XP SP3 that I picked up off the street around 2009. I had extensively tweaked it to optimal performance for it's assigned task so no internet abilities and stripped shells.
Click to expand...
I'm very curious about your DAW and your setup! I've been playing with Cooledit since the win3.1 days, but would like to multi-track now that I think I can use Audition 3.0 thanks to your link. :) I've got the standard sm58, sm57 as well as a few keyboards and a guitar and a few di boxes for getting these to input to usb as well as behringer mixer with usb out. :) I mainly mess around trying to get me to sound decent singing songs I like--and sometime I do succeed, haha!
 
The short version is I use an M-Audio Delta Audiophile 192 Sound card. I got it used on Ebay. The Audition 3.0 works well for me, but I recommend getting the update:
*Most of the Adobe Creative Suite 2 have update patches which do work but must be downloaded from here:
ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/
ftp://ftp.adobe.com/pub/adobe/audition/win/3.x/audition301.zip
I also have installed Audacity 2.1.3. It comes in handy when I need more precise settings on Airwindows legacy VST plugins which I believe are the best Free DSP plugins available.
https://www.airwindows.com/
If you work on 24 bit files or if you process 16 bit files in 32 bit, the Airwindows dithers are the best I've heard:
Studio Tan
Dark
Beam (my main one)
For Sample rate conversion I use FinalCD which in spite of it's name does all up/down conversions:
http://www.sonicillusions.co.uk/downloads.htm
And it is free. In quality it's main competitor is Weiss Saracon ($1000) in my opinion; based on hours of research reading comments by engineers whom own both.

I cut my teeth on CoolEdit and am training my son on it. Audition 3 will look familiar but has Many additions.
If you have particular questions, ask away. I understand hardware too. And I happen to like Behringer.
 
Thank you so much for all the info! It will be really fun to play with Audition 3 once I get a chance to get it up and running. :) And thank you for the offer to help as I'm sure I'm going to use it.

In fact, I think your knowledge on using XP as a DAW deserves its own thread. :) If you want to share what you know about turning XP into a nice DAW for free, make a new thread about it and hopefully it will attract others who want a DAW on the cheap.
 
TMTGTR said:
You've been reading my mind! The Audition 3.1 availability is a game changer.
I will look into this. I also have a background in XP DVWs (Digital Video Workstations) but have not yet installed the adobe progs. And of course ffmpeg which is updated for xp Here: https://rwijnsma.home.xs4all.nl/files/ffmpeg/?C=M;O=D
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Nice! Yes, definitely since Premiere is on that list of Adobe stuff they released. I still remember using premiere 1.0 and it was a game changer, although a very buggy one. My brother did edit a feature length movie in it once as a project for fun, but it wasn't exactly fun even though the results were fun.

FFmpeg is awesome! I used the command line version many decades ago to do some mass transcoding across a network of 98se systems, and it did a great job. :) Glad to see there is still work on it for XP.
 
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