Power supply capacitor replacement?

[tromoly]

I had a Hyper Type R 480W PSU in my tower, and long story short a few capacitors popped inside it. I picked up a replacement Antec unit at Fry's today, but I'd still like to fix the Hyper one to either sell for cheap or put into another tower. Anyone have experience replacing caps in PSU's? I haven't looked at the uF rating on them yet to get replacements, I'm wanting to get a second opinion before doing anything more.

Thanks for looking.

[mikec]

Well, the first question is, have you ever soldered before? If you have not and you do not have a soldering iron, solder and the skills, that sort of gives you the answer.

I am not trying to tell you NOT to learn it, but the first item you solder shouldn't be a PSU. If you make a mistake, you might damage a computer and waste $$.

If you have the experience, go for it.

Now, are these small caps or the BIG caps like in older TVs or CRT displays? Either way, please read up on how to discharge caps. You do not want to kill yourself.

BTW, why did the original caps pop? Is the PSU worth fixing or did the unit suffer more damage then just blown caps?

If you never soldered go back to Fry's and see if they have any small projects that you can build. Most electronics shops carry small basic electronic projects that you can build in a short time and learn while building something. You also can search the web as well.

[tromoly]

I have soldered before, I've worn out three soldering irons from various projects and I have worked with capacitors before. Plus the PSU has been unhooked for two days and I did discharge the capacitors yesterday, so everything is good on that front.

A couple of caps are a bit under an inch long and about 1/2 inch diameter, and one or two others are a bit smaller than that, they aren't the huge freakin' capacitors that could take down a cow. The bottom side of the circuit board looks clean, no signs of overheating/burning or anything on that side; I couldn't tell on the top side because there's a large mass of resistors and capacitors in that area. A couple of the popped caps are able to be wiggled but are still solidly soldered, not sure if it's just the leads bending or if the leads have disconnected from the body for some reason.

Tomorrow after work I'll remove the popped caps and try to get a closer look, everything else appears to be clean so it may be a relatively easy fix.

[tokenuser]

Dont even THINK about reselling it after you have "repaired" it.

[tromoly]

Originally Posted by tokenuser

Dont even THINK about reselling it after you have "repaired" it.

Relax, I wouldn't throw it on eBay, it'd be tested in my machine for a bit, checked again, then given to a friend or relative for a couple bucks. More thank likely it'll go into my spare machine when I get more HDDs to build a NAS.