Prescott overheating

[Child of Wonder]

A coworker of my dad's gave me her PC to fix. It's a Dell Dimension 3000 with a 3.0GHz P4 Prescott CPU.

The LED on the mobo lights up when it has power but the computer will not boot up at all. No activity no matter what I do.

I pulled the CPU and the IHS has a small hole on it with thermal paste oozing out. There are also little round areas on the corners that look like they might have goo coming out as well.

Can Prescotts get so hot as to melt the IHS, allowing thermal paste to ooze in, and fry the processor?

 

[BinarySynapse]

The goo coming out of the sides is (most lkely) just the adhesive that hold the IHS on. And it's normal for there to be thermal paste in the little hole in th IHS. Also the hole is supposed to be there. And there is also thermal paste between the IHS and the actual processor die. So everything sounds normal to me. But if you could post a picture of the CPU to show us what exactly you're seeing.

 

[rxteenager]

There could also be a handful of other things that can be causing it not to boot. Memory, the HD, the PSU, even the mobo itself. Have you tested the processor in another system to see if it's alive?

 

[Child of Wonder]

I don't have any other Socket 478 parts to test it with.

It's not the PSU since I've tried swapping that out and the same with the RAM. If the CPU hole is normal, then I doubt the CPU is causing the problem.

My money is on the motherboard.

I'll probably swap that out and see what happens.

Thanks for the information guys.

 

[W6FO]

If you are talking about this hole, yes it is normal.

 

[Child of Wonder]

Yep, that's exactly it.