Heat Problem with ASUS A7N8X

[justpete]

I have the ASUS A7N8X mobo. It's worked great for a couple years now.

Recently, my PC has been rebooting spontaneously. I've tracked it down to a heat problem. Each time it's reset, the CPU temp has been about 168F.

The problem is - the heat rises no matter what I do. Lowering ambient room temperature doesn't help (much), taking off the case didn't help, cleaning didn't help. I've turned it on, entered the BIOS to check the CPU temp - and watched it rise from an initial temp of about 90F at a rate of 1 degree a second until it shuts off at 168F.

I checked the heat sink on the chip - it seems to be seated correctly, but I'm enough of a noob that I'm not sure.

Any help?

 

[mas0n]

Did you replace the thermal pad or thermal paste?
Did you replace the HSF reciently?
Is the Q-Fan disabled in the BIOS?

 

[maury73]

If you didn't replace the CPU heatsink recently, check if the fan is rotating at the expected speed: with such temps it should run at maximum speed. Seems ti could be Q-Fan not working or some problem with the fan controller PWM.

You can test that first disabling Q-Fan and if it doesn't help connect your fan directly to a 12V drive cable through an Y-cable. If you haven't one of that, connect the black wire of fan connector to a black wire if the drive cable and the red fan wire to the yellow drive cable wire.
If it works like this, there's a mobo PWM failure, and the only thing you can do is connect the fan directly to a drive power cable or replace your mobo.

 

[4745454b]

Uhhh, guys, hes a noob remember? Lets hold off on the rewiring projects for a bit.

I have a couple of questions, and some things I want you to check. First, to lower the temps, take the side of your case off, and point a 12"+ house fan at the opening. This should keep the temps down long enough for you to try and fix this. My questions are as follows. Did you overclock this in any way? Did you build this? (or in other words, who put the heatsink on the chip?) If you don't already have it installed, download CPU-z, and take a look at it. I'm wondering if perhaps your voltage has been raised. (should be somewhere around 1.6 for SocketA chips.)

I'm guessing there is something wrong with either the heatsink, or the bios. (overvoltage, etc.) Fan dying on the heatsink would make sence also, but you didn't tell us the fan had stopped...

 

[Anoobis]

Your CPU fan is dying.

 

[justpete]

Thanks, guys. You were right on the money, something that I didn't get on some other sites I checked. The CPU fan was running too slowly, and a new fan did the trick.

It's nice to find a cheap solution to a hardware problem!