When designing a switching supply you have to look at the loop stability. Some "simple switchers" need a specific ESR to be stable. In this case you will have a switcher part then a inductor a cap and then a ferrite bead before the main part of the capacitors. Looking at your PCB you don't have a small ferrite bead with each larger inductor so you have the type where the loop compensation is done using a small SMT cap and SMT resistor. In this case the lower the ESR and the more capacitance the better.

gotta love the Pentuim 4 -ness of all of this. exploded capacitors, a Geforc2MX, and of all things, a talking bios!

Back before I had a vacuum desoldering station I would often use 22 awg solid copper wire to clean out the holes. The solder would stick to it and act like a desoldering braid. I would just keep heating and pushing it in the same direction until it would pull back out. I can recall recapping many Abit boards BP6, VP6, etc. So much easier now with the desoldering station.

I have to say that I absolutely miss main boards with that translucent amber solder mask. Being able to see all the traces makes the board look gorgeous. If a manufacturer used that on a modern board, I'd buy it in a heartbeat and not even look at the price. I am so very tired of black PCBs when they can make them any color they want. I actually want to modify a modern windowed case to accept those cool looking vintage boards.

One recommendation I would make, is to reflow the solder on the NB heat sink connector mounts. Back in my repair days I saw many motherboards laid low by a broken solder joint on the NB heat sink connector. The solder joint would break and then the heat sink would pop off and after repeated uses the NB would fry do to over heating. As always, great video!

Hearing that lady's voice say "System completed power on self test" brought back so many memories. My old Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe board had the same speaking BIOS.

Interesting IDE cable problem. The motherboard is supposed to detect the 40 pin cable and limit the Ultra DMA mode to 2.

It must have been very trendy back then! I don't know if you're familiar with French cars, but the Renault 25 had a similar system with voice for diagnostics - the most common message was "Back left door improperly closed" when we didn't close them strong enough as kids :-)

I'm glad you mentioned the confusing silk screen polarity markings. Earlier this year, I recapped an entire Biostar slot-1 motherboard backwards because of this and only realised my mistake much later after the north bridge had fried.

Vobis... I remember the 486 we bought was a Highscreen Colani tower 486 DX2-66. We bought it at the local Vobis store at the Finnlandhaus in Hamburg. Apart from an issue with the changeable harddrive because of a busted frame, it worked like a dream. We even upgraded it ourselvbes with a Soundblaster and a CD-ROM drive. I miss that computer almost as much as I miss my first PC, a 286-16 we bought from Karstadt at the Einkaufszentrum Hamburger Straße, also in HH.

I think I still have one of those talking boards in some box in storage, might be a P4B as well. It was quite funny hearing those messages, but I found them actually useful. Instead of trying to decorate the errors from the beeps, it was easier to understand what's going on.

I think we need to tell Windows XP that having unknown hard errors is nothing to be ashamed about.

The FP headers not being there was priceless. The fact that in the manual it shows them there but not the other FP connectors .😂

That jumper to Kobe the PC speaker sound to the speakers and the voice boot were in many of the Top model of Asus' boards back then. The P4P800-Delixe for example had the voice messages.

Oh yes, definitely! I got 3 of these, two of which are revision 1.03 and one 1.04. All of them came in non-working condition and required most caps to be replaced. I've settled for electrolytic ones however, to maintain the period correct layout. And yes, that speech voice reporter is something that I use all the time, never gets old! But I could easily imagine others who might not agree on this one.

I recapped many different boards during that time, crapping out brands: GSC, Lelon, Canicon, Chhsi, Fuhjyyu, G-Luxon, OST, Sacon Good brands are: Rubycon, Panasonic, Nichicon (not during that era), Samxon, Sanyo, Chemi-Con and then the motherboard specific series with Ultra low ESR.

Wow, that XP installation music takes me back! I don't think I've installed XP with sound in a LONG time!

I somewhat vaguely remember a friend of a friend whose built system had that "talking BIOS" feature. I remember that it was possible to change the startup sound, and he was able to play some goofy song when it booted. I'm sure it got old pretty quickly, though. Good call on checking the polarity before putting in the new caps. I would almost certainly have overlooked if it was me.

I once recapped a socket 939 sli deluxe board, which also had the speech built in. I also had to reflash the bios on it because installing and using windows xp was slow and a pain to use, after the flash it worked great :D

Just a tip: If you don't have the 80 line cable around, you can use the 40 line version if you disable Ultra-dma access in bios. It should be somewhere in the integrated IDE controller options, depending on the board. It will be far slower but it will work.

09:02 i remember having that on an ASUS A7N8X after that it used to say 'computer now booting from operating system" :)

You probably already know this, but for those that don't, Win98 successfully installed and ran because it defaults to PIO (Programmed Input/Output) mode unless DMA mode is enabled either by the user or the chipset driver (and even then, not all drivers do this) so even though u-DMA was set in the bios, the OS negotiated PIO mode by default, but Win XP enables the highest reported DMA mode available hence why it would fall over almost as soon as the install began.

You should totally try the 2133Mhz setting for the processor speed. Pretty much all of the 400fsb Pentium 4's (well for socket 478 anyway) you could set 533fsb and they'd just work like they were made for it. No need to mess with voltage or anything. Just be fun to see a comparison. For awhile during this era I remember the 400fsb 1.8Ghz - 2Ghz P4 was the budget goto since it was as simple as setting the option to run it no fuss at 2.4Ghz - 2.6Ghz.

I used to have a Asus P4P800-E Deluxe Socket 478 motherboard, and later on a Asus PC-DL dual socket 603 motherboard. Both had speech messages as yours. Great video.

4:45, 4:53 there are still three unpopulated capacitor locations. ALWAYS use 80 wire ribbon cables on boards with IDE faster than ATA33. The additional wires are grounds in between the signal wires. They help to reduce crosstalk and interference.

Great video. Funny thing, I have the same motherboard and have had it for many many years, and never bothered to enable to the BIOS Speech thing, and completely forgot about it until now. Thanks! I've now enabled it for fun.

This series of ASUS mobos were great. That BIOS voice was interesting to begin with. But hearing every time you started or restarted got old.

I also had one of these P4 mobo's with a talking BIOS. I was very suprised to hear the PC talk to me for the first time :D It was a relatively cheap system (2.4ghz with a SIS chipset and FX5200) so I doubt the voice was considered a 'premium feature'. I think it might actually be geared towards the average homeuser, so they could resolve problems without having to consult a manual or have much tech knowledge.

I've got a good bunch of motherboards that don't work. This video and others from your channel are about to make me buy a capacitor tester and then fresh caps for the boards; so, uh, thanks for the inspiration. Anyway, I'm also subscribing since I enjoy this content a lot, besides finding it helpful.

Have an exact same Asus P4B motherboard with a 1,8GHz Pentium 4, but it uses Rubycon capacitors all over and none of them have bulged nor leaked yet. Still works.

8:54 I have the AX4C Max II from Aopen and they have a very similar speaking BIOS. I can see why most motherboards did not continue with this feature.

I *need* you to edit the voices -- please do a video on them -- replacing them with fun sound effects. Because this is amazing.

I got the same motherboard. Nice board and still working and playing HALO CE.

I remembered this exact voice message as soon as you mentioned the feature 8:34 from my old Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe Socket A motherboard. I still have it with an Athlon XP-M 2500+ (Barton), that once worked at 2.5GHz. I'm looking forward to restoring that system one day 😅

Woow 😀 That 'System completed, power on self test' bringed back some old memory's (!) 16Mb of them i think 🤣 Ohh, then the 'Computer now booting from operative system' ❤ Glad to hear everything works. Oh, some of my memoris is also from when it not worked, when u switched on the computer and didn't got those friendly "Everything works nothing to worry" -messages. Brings back some Anxiety memories 😬

When desoldering capacitors I use the identical FNIRSI HS-01, which you once introduced in one of your videos. I use a Dell 130 watt power supply that came with my XPS laptop on the USB soldering iron. The temperature never drops!!! Desoldering has never been so easy for me. I would be very interested in the “CPU Tray 3D” project. I have around 30 CPUs lying around. From 386 to Pentium (Socket 7). Ausserdem! Dank dir fürs Video

Didn't have a board like this myself but my work collegue did - he replaced the `System Completed Power-on Self-test` (which replaced the regular POST beep) with a recording of himself saying "beep".

Great to see the motherboard working! As soon as I read the title of the video, "system failed CPU test" came to my memory. I didn't remember Asus' speech POST was available in such "old" mainboards, I thought it was newer (like late socket 478 or early 775). As others have mentioned, resoldering the northbridge heatsink mounts would be a good idea, it was a common problem. Never encountered problems using a 40 conductor cable for the HDD on an UDMA system. Of course the maximum DMA mode would be limited and some "modern" mainboards even showed a warning during POST, but the inability to install the OS is new to me. Maybe a specifical "issue"/limitation with those flash card adapters? Great video, as always!

All capacitors reported as capacitors by the tester is a nice beginning :)

I owned one of those talkinf bios boards and yes you were right I quickly jumpered it to OFF. I must still have it in my loft as I have evey system I have ever owned up thier going back to my Amiga 1200 Tower with Zorro 2 slots (which seems to be fairly rare nowdays)

My brother had a Soyo Athlon board with the voice feature. It was great when building if you get no display but diagnostic LEDs or 7-segment displays are better IMO.

I had a P4T-533C which also had that voice POST.

haaa I love the voice feature!

There are very little resources on the internet on those 3300uF 16V Chinese capacitors. So thanks for trying them out and taking some measurements. I have a bit of a concern though: in one section of your video you measured a capacitance of 3544uF @ ESR of 0.3 ohm.The capacitance is fine as it is within 20% tolerance of the 3300uF rating, the ESR is a bit more interesting. On some capacitor spec sheets you will find a tan-delta value that usually varies by voltage and it's usually measured at 120Hz, 20'C. We can assume that your component measuring tool measures ESR at similar conditions. We can use the formula: ESR = tandelta / (2*pi*f*C) It follows that 0.3 = tandelta / (2*3.14 * 120 * 0.003544), which implies that tandelta = 0.3 * (2*3.14*120*0.003544) = 0.8 Back in the day, people would replace those capacitors with Rubycon MBZ (an ULTRA Low ESR series capacitor) which (according to the spec sheet) has a tan-delta value of about 0.2. In the case of the MBZ, you should've measured the ESR at: ESR = 0.2 / (2*3.14*120*0.0033) = 0.08. Like you, I'm a hobyist at best, but to my understanding the ESR does play a role on some VRM-switching circuits as it is essentially a timing problem where you want the capacitance to build up quickly and release energy / voltage at a certain speed.

Never thought about this board - just bought one to add to my collection. Already have p2b and p3b boards, so why not add a p4b? ;) I enjoyed the video!

Hi ! Interestig video & good video mounting. The first time that i had to replace capacitors was in 2003, a PIII motherboard. For next years, plataforms in socket A and intel P4 with the same problem. Windows Xp installation was imposible without replace them! . For my MB collection only replace with the best, no electrolitic. Some people prefer the low cost reparations. Actually you can check in MB (& GPU cards) solid state capacitors and tantalio capacitors since years.

My A7N8X has this, possibly some boards I had previously also did, but I NEVER enabled it. I really felt it's a gimmick more than useful.

OMG I have the ASUS P4B266-E and the manual says it supports Vocal Post Messages too! Gotta check it out, although I'm pretty sure the capacitors are also bulged and in need of replacement 🙂

I had one! Asus K8V SE Deluxe for the Socket 754 :)

The first time I heard about these tslking POST messages was when I got my ASUS A7N8X-DLX for S462, it should be contemporary to your s478 board.

I don't understand why these SD-IDE adapters require 80pin IDE cable. The converter chip does not support UHS, so it's limited to 25 MB/s anyway.

One of my first computers, the Emerson 80286 (not my specific first computer, though) had a talking BIOS. They're kinda freaky, lol.

Soltek also have a speech reporter like thing.

I guess you could replace the "system completed power on self test successfully" message with a nice startup sound. The Apple Mac "Bong" for example.

Had one of those talking BIOS boards. Was annoying indeed. Always forgot to turn that off after a BIOS update/reset when experimenting/overclocking. But when investigation a failure I'd still prefer this talk. 7-segment post code > speech > beep codes that vary by manufacturer *eyeroll*

I own a talking Asus board and you can change not only the voices, but the graphic on the POST too 😊 BTW I newel knew about 40/80 IDE cable issue, becouse I aways used 80 for HDDs and 40 for CDs. I only used 40 for HDDs on old motherboards like up to 486 and Pentiun 1 systems.

I remember experiencing speech through the internal speaker on post on some cheap mainboards, there was no reference in the manual to it and when we got in touch with the supplier he thought we were pulling his leg, so had to put the phone next to it when it started, was quite funny, but he rang back in the afternoon and confirmed that the boards that they tested of that brand did the same, was hilarious at the time, if memory serves it was about the time of the Cyrix M2 and the AMD k6, the voice belonged to some Chinese chick which kept on saying 'too hot' too hot' on bootup through the internal speaker, it would even do it without a CPU installed ! I cant remember the brand but it was one of the cheap ones that had an ALI chipset, other than that niggle the boards seemed fine.

Some SD to IDE adapters caused me trouble in the past. I was buying 44-pin mini versions off Aliexpress to replace HDD in Amiga 600 and a PIII laptop. Out of 6, only 2 were solid - faulty ones would randomly freeze the Amiga, and corrupt SD card on PIII. Changing SD cards didn't seem to matter. While adapter could only push approx. half the transfer speed of era appropriate HDD for the laptop (only 12.5MB/sec), XP on it still felt way faster due to near zero seek time; and A600 running off SD card somehow was a bit slower than with HDD. Just my two cents.

Oh wow, did the Asus A7A266 also have this feature? I knew I recognized this board somewhere. I had a working example and sold it on eBay for a surprising amount of money, for being an Athlon board.

Asus A7N8X-E Deluxe has the same talking bios feature, and if I recall you can also modify what is said

Hi Sir! In fact I knew about the talking feature, I think that it is an Asus thing. I have an Asus A8N8X Deluxe skt939 with Opeteron 180 with that feature. It was a funny thing in the first 3 or 4 times. Now I disabled that thing

I had an ASUS talking bios board once. I got it untested for very cheap and sadly that feature was all I got out of it "no CPU installed". I seem to recall it was an AMD Athlon 64 system though.

The BIOS voice messages feature reminds me of those voice alerts on cars from the 80s (which used the same chip as the Speak-and-Spell). Those got annoying real quick and owners came up with ways to disable it.

You should definitely edit the messages to say some funny things! I also was AMD back then, I wanted Intel but AMD was so much cheaper - I had an AMD Athlon XP1800 if I remember correctly.

Yeah, I knew about those talking motherboards. I once got an Aopen AK73 Pro board (VIA KT133 chipset) with an Athlon XP 1600+ CPU which didn't work/boot. I heard some strange noise through the small piezo buzzer but couldn't clearly hear it. When I connected a real PC speaker I was like whaaat? Female voice: "Your CPU may have a problem" It talks! 😅 I never got around to figure out was was broken though, the board or indeed the CPU itself. Perhaps some day I'll have another look.

Another great video. Do you have a link for the 3D printed CPU tray?

Did you dummy fit the north-bridge heatsink to see if it contacted the heatsink paste, because the foam square support might be too think if you are not using a heatpad again. With caps I think you are supposed to only go up 1 voltage value, because different voltage ratings work at different frequencies.

Asus A7N8X Deluxe and the -E with gigabit have this feature.. I like it, I think it's cool.. I expiremented with changing sounds. It is still cool. Also, FWIW, just trash all your 40-conductor cables. Not really woreth it anymore.. as soon as they came out, I stopped using them all together back then.,.

I have a socket 939 Asus A8V-E Deluxe with that post speech reporter thing

wunderbare :)

There were several ASUS boards that have the talking BIOS, notably the A7V-333 for AMD athlons of the same era as this board.

My dad had a board with this talking BIOS back in the day. I don't know what was wrong with the PC, but every time he would turn it on, the BIOS complained "No CPU installed!" twice, but then POST normally. Maybe some incompatibility with the power supply? I had an Athlon XP 2400+ as well, on a cheap MSI board with VIA chipset.

I have a few boards with this speech function and yes it does become bothersome quite fast. I have considered replacing caps on motherboards but was worried I would ran into the issue you ran into. Since I don't have a hot air station. Would you advice to try ut anyway? Oh and I'd love to see how much thermal paste was squeezed out between the cooler and cpu haha ;) P.S. I love the bit with the Out Of Box Experience (oobe) in the end. Nice music always.

i had one of these motherboards, and tried replacing the voice samples with my own voice but i spoke too slowly, and it seems to have overrun the defined buffer the bios lost all ability to boot from pata hdd's! but it was still able to boot from pata cdrom, and the win98 install cd could then chainload the hdd, and get back into the editing sw and one day while messing with overclocking, it rebooted on its own, then claimed no cpu was found!

Is it weird that I find the layout and sans serif typeface on the new caps to be very aesthetically pleasing?

Aopen AX4B Pro, has a talking bios. it's called Dr Bios, & it tells me when it has problems. it also tells me indirectly when the capacitors all burst

Ah yes. The "puke yellow" color used by old Asus boards. I miss those days; I had so much fun building systems in the early-mid. 2000s.

I had an ASUS P4PE with the same talking BIOS feature.

i've had trouble installing windows xp early this year too. i got old parts lying around and thought of building a retro gaming pc but windows xp refuses to boot on my asrock board with 478 socket with some hard drive error. i forgot the model but it came out after windows xp so the motherboard should be compatible, i don't get it. using the same drive i installed windows xp on a asus m2n-se plus without any issues but this one doesn't have agp slot.

Hey, I think those additional voice samples are from my own video about the P4B's talking BIOS. Small world. I don't mind, spread the word about this odd board! Mine eventually died, not due to bad caps, but rather a VRM short it developed after sitting outside in the elements for a while. I reiterate the comment about the northbridge heatsink clips, one was already broken on mine.

I had a motherboard that would complain loudly "System failed due to CPU overclocking" randomly on startup when I never overclocked it. I don't remember the model but it was an Athlon motherboard, I think Athlon XP era.

Asus P4GE-V is another on that has Spoken Bios post. I have one as a retro gaming PC. No cap issues yet. Info: Windows XP ( Service Pack 3 ) Platform Information Processor Type: Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 Processor Processor level: Family 15 Processor Revision: Model 2 Stepping 9 Active Processor Mask: 1 Number of Processors: 1 Controller Information IDE Controller: Intel(R) 82801DB Ultra ATA Controller, ICH4 Storage Kit Build(s): 2.3.0.2164, Storage Kit Installed: 2.3.0.2164 Driver Build: Intel Application Accelerator Driver Driver Version: 2.3.0.2160 IDE Controller Tri-State: IDE Controller enabled PIO Mode Support: 0 - 2 - 3 - 4 DMA SW Mode Support: 2 DMA MW Mode Support: 1 - 2 UDMA Mode Support: 0 - 1 - 2 - 3 - 4 - 5 Disk Timeout Value: Default CDROM Timeout Value: Default CD Audio Timeout Value: Default UDMA on 80 conductor cable only: Default, Disabled Flush Enable: Default, Disabled Ping Pong Enable: Enabled

very funny to hear this BIOS talking! 1st time i c that. i have a similar board P4VP-MX which doesn't post. any suggestions pls. thanks for the video

some aopen motherboards with the 845 chipset also has this feature, dr voice it's called i think

asus and it's reverse marking for capacitor , if you replaced with wrong polarity you would hear a nice bang sound

I had a p4 board with the asus ai voices too... hilarious I think it was the p4p800(-e?) deluxe

I've never even heard of a talking BIOS (if you'll pardon the pun), let alone seen one, even during the times I worked at a computer store, which were during the Pentium 4 era. Personally, I did have a Pentium 4, although only for a short time. My friend upgraded his P4 3.8GHz to the 3.73GHz Extreme Edition, so I got his hand-me-down and upgraded my A64 3800+. However I soon realised this was a mistake when the A64 X2 came out, so I switch back to AMD with an X2 4600+.

10x less thermal paste is needed. I was screaming at my screen seeing that "correct" amount... Anyway.... :D

i want to hear the POST voice as Morgan Freeman :D

Those chinese no name "solid" caps can be also be regular caps without vent markings... Things that expect solid caps don't last long and the bang from venting is quite load

Can we get more info on the SD card adapter to IDE ? Please and thank you

I had one of these type boards that talked for bios messages and yea it got annoying

I have Asus P4C800-E Delux and it have speaking BIOS

What are the orange and white connectors near the DIP switches? They look very non-standard.

I'm glad I am not the only one massively struggling with motherboards + capacitors! It is a pain! I need to meet whoever had the idea of a "talking bios". I think it's the most useless feature ever designed. :D

asus and asrock both at least in that time period did the reverse capacitor slikscreens this is such a pain :] but that was a paciliuar hdd fault, most time i connected udma drive on dma cable it simply complained in the bios that i am using wrong cable or just downgraded for me. probably depends if dma level resolving logic is on hdd firmware , on botherboard bios or both and those sd card readers might not want to downgrade unless it is enforced from the controller side perhaps the voice post codes require more room on bios chip and cable fault reporting was choped :] try regular udma hdd if it behaves the same it is the mobo, if it downgrades to dma 33 it was the sd card reader

No CPU installed? How would that one play?

I do not recall that "welcome to windows" screen. Maybe it's because I had the pro version. I've never used XP home. I prefer to just get into it. I NEVER want MS to hold my hand. And I hate the fact that it's headed more and more in that direction now.

how come you didn't use the fnirsi? something wrong with it? that talking bios is mega cool

this is why a vpanel is used, it is a custom mainboard for maxdata. Asus boards with vpanel are always stuff used by third party.