Motherboard or hard drive problem

[tanchiro58]

Hi delluser,

I had used with my Dell XPS400 for about yearlong. Suddenly it has problem lately the screen got frozen after about 30min running. I am not a gamer but newly photographer and have loaded quite a lot of pictures in my PC via Adobe photoshop CS4.

First I thought it has a problem with my stock hard drive and a stock video card which could not handle with loading and processing tons of megabyte pictures. I have replaced the video card with Nvidia 9500GT and Hitachi 1T SATA Deskstar. The screen still get frozen after 20 min. And the CD ROM ran about 2-3 min then stop (no blinking light). Note that this is a new CD-ROM I replaced for the stock one awhile ago.

My questions are the problem is caused by bad hard drive, video card or the motherboard and/or the CPU itself? I hope your help will solve my PC problem.

Thanks in advance,
Tan

 

[o1die]

Dell cooling setups are different, depending on a shroud of plastic to move the warm air to a fan in the back of the case that blows it out on some models. If this is your design, you can go with any number of cpu heatsinks and remove the plastic shroud. The arctic freezer 64 works pretty well. Examine your dell board for the 4 push pin holes that many Intel heatsinks use. If yours is amd, they use clips to atatch many aftermarket heatsinks.

 

[tanchiro58]

I have already cleaned up but the problems are still existing. Therefore, I have questions of whether I should replace the mobo and CPU or just get rid of the XPS 400?

Thanks again for your help.