Differences Between VA5 Game Gear Boards

As I've never seen this posted anywhere, I wanted to put it online.

I have had a few different VA5 Game Gear boards pass by me but today I noticed an odd difference. On one C44 is missing a capacitor, and this is what I've seen in all VA5 boards.
But now this new one I got has a 473 smd resistor in its place. C41 also has a lower rated cap than usual as well.

Going through the rest of the board the chips used are also of different manufacturers, which I don't find as strange.

If anyone has an idea as to why the difference let me know!

Link: http://imgur.com/a/0y52D

that is pretty interesting. my guess is they found a way to omit the cap (expensive part) with a cheap resistor and achieve the same result. Almost all changes among GG revisions however, have to do with the LCD manufacturing. I've seen a huge range in GG models and it seems Sega worked very hard to change the boards often in order to accommodate the newer revisions of the LCD (with less blur). I wonder if the manufacturer really had them by the jugular with that, and perhaps, why they didn't keep the VDP separate or design a separate LCD controller instead of integrating it into the VDP in order to better control cost and unnecessary redesigns of the entire board.

Then again, they were trying to design new ASICs to reduce battery life too. Poor sega, hated on so much they had to redesign a great system 10 times over :/

-Segasonicfan

That sounds like a most likely answer. And satisfying one. I just found it so odd to find a revision within a revision. I can't tell if it works any better than the other va5. I was going to mod it but I'll leave it as is. Any other va5 I see online also looks like the one without the resistor.

First time I've seen the resistor and white caps in a va5