Overheating CPU
My machine continues to behave in a manner that keeps me on my toes. In the last two days, I've either come home or woken up to a machine that had turned itself off. Not a good sign. My thinking is that either a faulty power-supply or overheating CPU is causing the problem. Investigating I find that my CPU (and rather dated AMD XP2800+) is running at 70 C when Windows XP is idle - on the high side. So it seems I need to clean out the box and re-seat the heatsink. Having done this a couple of times already makes me wonder if I'm doing it too often (once a year). Has anybody else been faced with having to do the same? Is this normal to have to re-seat the sink every year or so? I'm using arctic silver compound which is supposed to be good. Is there a better compound out?
posted by Mark @ 9:44 AM
3 comments
3 Comments:
AFAIK you don't need to regularly reseat the CPU and replace the thermal compound. Well, I haven't and haven't had any problems.
I would check your fans though - case and CPU. I put 2 new case fans, and a new CPU fan in our AMD based computer, and it's nice and cool now. Arctic Cooling is recommended - nice and quiet as well as cool. You can get them with thermostats, so it doesn't need to run faster than it needs to, or a manual speed switch at the back, which you could play with to get the right temperature. And you can speed it up if you're playing games, or something CPU intensive.
As you can tell, noise is important to us, as well as keeping that CPU cool.
I opened up the box to find that the heatsink was loaded with dust. Strange as I replaced the video card not to long ago and cleaned out the dust from inside the box. My temperature has dropped way back down and is idling around 50 C.
We'll keep our eye on it though. Thanks for the feedback.
Okay, so it was more than just a dust issue. My cleaning out the dust merely hid the fact that my fan was packing up. After getting some overheating warnings I noticed the fan CPU Fan RPM was very low. I replaced the heat sink and I'm idling in the low 40s - even better.
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