Brother's PC Dying

K

Kuromizu

Gawd
Joined
Apr 1, 2008
Messages
717
My brother's PC suddenly started overheating like mad just yesterday. It's in a small case (mini ATX) and has some decent sized parts in it, but generally doesn't get as hot as it did yesterday.

His specs are:

650w Ultra PSU
3800+ AMD AM2 CPU
2GB Corsair DDR2 PC5400
ATI 4870 1GB
Seagate 1.5TB HDD


Normally his CPU starts up around 36 degrees and hits near 50 for a max. Suddenly it's starting up at 50 from a cold boot. It restarts and hovers around 70 and gets near 88 for a max before shutting itself down.

We already opened it up, cleaned it out, and re-applied thermal paste (thoroughly clearing out the old paste) but we had no luck. Today we put a whole new heatsink on it and it didn't make a lick of difference.

Any ideas? We're really low budget PC gamers (got the 4870 for $70 on craigslist) so we can really afford to blow tons of cash on a new rig.

Thanks in advance for your time and help.
 
Some suggestions -

Is your motherboard capable of fan monitoring? Make sure the fans are actually spinning properly and at speed. Another possibility is to reset to defaults in bios or clear cmos to make sure something funny didn't happen to the fan throttling system. It could even be some loose wire impeding the fan blades.

Try to move the heat sink with gentle-moderate force, perhaps the retention system is faulty and it is not seating properly? Another way to check this as well would be to apply paste using the bead/pea method (1 small drop center of the die), mount the sink and then remove it to see if it has spread.

Possible dust issues?

Does it still over heat if you say run it with the entire case open?

Try blasting a desk fan at it and see what happens?

When you cleaned the heat sink, did you make sure to clean bot the sink and the cpu? What did you use to do it?

Check if maybe the bottom of the sink has warped somehow?
 
Check CPU voltage. maybe something going on with motherboard components
 
Checked CPU voltage, it's running at about 1.26v. Wiped down the CPU and heatsink with a clean (non fiber shedding) cloth. I didn't have any alcohol around but this usually works well enough. I also checked the reflection coming off the base of the heatsink to make sure it was flat.

I think I'll clear the CMOS but I did reset the bios defaults already.
 
I know this is a dumb question but is the cpu fan spinning? lol the retention mechanism on the hsf combo did not come loose did it?
 
Check the fans are spinning, pull the heat sink again and CLEAN it well with alcohol. Make sure the case fans are functioning as normal.

What thermal paste are you using and how old is it?
 
Sounds like a fan problem. Try connecting the cpu fan to a molex connector instead of to the motherboard. Might be louder, but at least you'll know it's getting 12V. I don't think it's a thermal compound issue, as long as there's something there other than air you shouldn't be getting temps that bad. Even cheese didn't make a 15C difference at idle (see: [H] thermal paste comparison).
 
Best guess: try swapping the power supply for a known good unit. I've had that experience with
Ultra before.

Second guess: bad motherboard or cpu
 
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