MSI MS-5169 No Post Repair

[mitchkramez]

Hey all, just wanted to share my experience reviving my old MSI MS-5169 Super Socket 7 Motherboard.

Initially, this had a ton of bad capacitors on it. All were replaced with modern equivalents, but after replacement, there was still no post. Checking the common mosfet failures on these boards showed that both of mine were still healthy and functioning properly.

After checking a few things, I turned my attention to some orange staining on the CPU socket itself. Initially I thought it was just rust stains or something like that, but as I tried to clean it, I noticed it was almost a little sticky. This got me wondering if it had somehow gotten inside the socket and was preventing good contact with the CPU pins. I popped the cover off of the socket and sure enough, much more was under the sliding cover of the ZIF socket. With A LOT of contact cleaner, brass brushing and deoxit, i re-inserted the CPU, expecting no change, and the heavens opened and I got a full post and fully working motherboard!

Just wanted to share a success and something else to check on really any motherboard you're working on. I wish i knew what this rust colored stuff was, but I'm very happy to have gotten this sweet old ATX1.0 SS7 board revived

This photo is a "before" recap, but after I had cleaned up the external stains on the socket. I wish I had a photo of that and the socket with the lid off, but no such luck.

 

[Kai Robinson]

I definitely now need to check inside my CPU socket of the K7N2 Ultra in project Middlesex, juuuuust to be on the safe side! Crap - even that board is 20 years old now!

 

[mitchkramez]

Just wanted to follow up here again that after I got a whole load of CPUs in and started testing them in this board, I realized that I must not have cleaned the socket pins well enough the first time since every time i switched a CPU in, it wouldn't post again. So i took the socket cover off one last time, squeamishly, trying not the break it.

For cleaning this time, I took some welding tip cleaners and contact cleaner and scraped every one of the 321 pins of that stupid socket. I took pictures before cleaning it this time so you could see some remnants of the brown goo, which make me thing it looks awfully similar to the cap goo that was on the tops of the blown capacitors nearby, so it's highly likely it was just cap guts that had vented and gotten into the cpu socket I suppose! You can see mostly along the top and right side of the socket where the goo was - it was much thicker than this before cleaning the first time.

At any rate, after cleaning this, I tested 11 different CPUs to make sure they were good and didn't have a single issue with posting after the cleaning so I think we're good now