No replies.... wow I really have no luck with these repair help requests... I guess the stuff I like working on is not very popular.... 🙁

Unfortunately this motherboard is not very common. Keep it around until the right moment. Many things I repair were stored for years until I find the right spare part, or the I acquire the knowledge. Take it easy. Good luck! and Merry Christmas.

tauro wrote on 2024-12-24, 19:51:

Unfortunately this motherboard is not very common. Keep it around until the right moment. Many things I repair were stored for years until I find the right spare part, or the I acquire the knowledge. Take it easy. Good luck! and Merry Christmas.

Merry Christmas everyone!

Good news!!!

I managed to get the board to POST.

No idea if it is stable or not - I'm currently installing XP.

With no parts list, I tried to color match the missing capacitors (and there were a lot of them) to pictures found online (most of witch are of very poor quality) and nearby components. I don't know if it is stable or if the Xaber200 graphics core works correctly, most of the missing SMDs were from behind it. This is the worst way of trying to get this board back on it's feet, but it's better then nothing.

If anyone has this board, please post some high res pictures of the back!!!

[UPDATE]

Installed XP SP3. Using 512MB of DDR400, 2 sticks of kingmax ram (first thing I had on hand the mainboard posted with - in fact it's the first ram I tried in it), an Athlon 2600+ (thoroughbred core 2083Mhz) and a 40GB HDD.

3dmark 01 score with the 40mb 306 driver. I still have a couple more drivers to test. So far the Xabre 200 seems to be close to a Geforce 3 Ti200 in testing:

3dmark 01 score with the VGA driver off the ECS website. Tiny driver, only a few MB in size. No settings, no control panel. This driver is very slow, I don't recommend using it.

Everest system overview. The video adapter identifies itself as a "Xaber 330", and the GPU as "Xaber 200".

Video RAM is 4ns, but it's clocked at 200MHz (400 effective). These chips should be able to run at 480-500MHz safely - not that I'm going to try.

Period review of the Xabre 400: http://ixbtlabs.com/articles/triplexxabre/index.html#p4 - seems they scored 6800pts in 3dm01. I think I can match that on my setup, due to using a faster CPU.

The ceramic caps on the back of the NB/chipsets/CPU are typically for high-frequency noise filtering on the power rails that supply these chips (typically 1.2 to 2V), so their exact values aren't that important. Just about anything will do. That said, generally, I use 4.7 uF ceramic caps for the "larger" ones (I have plenty of these from scrapped Xbox 360 motherboards.) Meanwhile, the "smaller" ones, you'll be OK with 100-330 nF (0.1 to 0.33 uF)... though if you want to go higher, there won't be any harm done. And a few missing won't break the bank either... usually. So just take a scrap motherboard or video card and take the ceramic caps off of that from behind one of the large BGA chips.

momaka wrote on 2025-02-10, 22:49:

The ceramic caps on the back of the NB/chipsets/CPU are typically for high-frequency noise filtering on the power rails that supply these chips (typically 1.2 to 2V), so their exact values aren't that important. Just about anything will do. That said, generally, I use 4.7 uF ceramic caps for the "larger" ones (I have plenty of these from scrapped Xbox 360 motherboards.) Meanwhile, the "smaller" ones, you'll be OK with 100-330 nF (0.1 to 0.33 uF)... though if you want to go higher, there won't be any harm done. And a few missing won't break the bank either... usually. So just take a scrap motherboard or video card and take the ceramic caps off of that from behind one of the large BGA chips.

For the 2 larger ones I used 22uf, that's what I had on hand. 4.7, 10 and 22uf caps in this size are pretty common in 1999-2001 video cards. I can't remember what the smaller ones (0805 size?) were, but I think I used like 8x 1uf caps, witch are a lighter brown / milk coffee color. I also used a couple of 4.7uf caps witch are darker brown, since there were two sets of pads in paralel, and one of the pair had 4.7uf caps. I figured the mission one of the pair is probably identical.