I have a Precision 690 BIOS A08 that I am upgrading for a customer. It had a Dual Core and 4 Gig RAM. It is a MY171 board and I got 2 quad cores and 16GB ram for it. We were prepping it for Win 2008 or 2012.
I put the processors in it and the memory in it and it posted, and I was like OK, this is going well. I went in the BIOS and saw both Quad cores and all 8 2GB sticks of memory.
Booted to a USB stick to run Memtest and noticed only 8GB of RAM. Shut down pulled the battery and held the power button for 30 seconds, then left the battery out for 30 min.
Restarted and it complained about incompatible processor. So decided to pull the quads and go back to the original dual core and troubleshoot the dram. Booted up still have 1/2 the RAM. Went to pull the ram and and started looking at the dust that was there when I was installing the ram. I had blown the box out well just recently with a compressor. So I was surprised that this dust had not been blown out.
Pulled the sticks and noticed that possibly some dust might be in a few slots, and figured I'd pull everything but the first two sticks and start looking for a bad stick. Then I saw the Blown Capacitor that looks like it might be supplying power to "some" of the ram slots.
The box runs OK, if I had not noticed the RAM being off, I wouldn't know from the way it was running. Before I noticed the RAM issue I had created a RAID array.
Has anybody had experience with these Caps blowing like this?
How about repaired one?
It seems like it must be this one CAP because the box is running too well for anything else. It looks like this cap is part of a pair that may feed 1/2 of the ram slots.