- Oct 22, 2009
- 4
- 0
- 18,510
Specs: Q8300, P5Q SE, GTX 260, 4GB Corsair 800mhz, OCZ Fatality 550W PSU, Windows 7 32-bit
A couple of days ago my PC suddenly grinded to a laggy halt. I could jerkily move the mouse around but nothing else would respond. Eventually I just switched it off at the back. I wasn't running anything particularly taxing, just an MSN conversation, a browser window and Spotify.
Upon powering back up, I was immediately warned about a CPU temperature problem. I checked in the BIOS and indeed, it read 87.5C. I suspect that one (or more) of the push pins on the heatsink popped out, as this happened once before last year and there always seems to be a lot of tension when seating it.
Anyway, I replaced the processor and heatsink with an older one (E5200, stock heatsink), and my PC worked as normal. After presumably eliminating other parts as the problem, I decided to give the original processor another shot so I replaced the thermal grease and re-installed it. Temperatures were about what I'm used to (~35C idle up to around 60C if playing a demanding game) but now the system was crashing constantly. BSODs relating to a whole range of dlls. One of the more interesting BSODs said:
The stack memory was corrupted by a device driver, likely due to attempt by malicious software to gain control of the system.
If I underclock the processor the system runs quite happily. At stock speeds it will crash consistently, sometimes before Windows can even finish loading.
I'm fairly sure that I'm going to be buying a new component (or two) before this issue is fixed, but what is the most likely problem here? Processor seems obvious but if it was really damaged the other day I wouldn't expect it to work at all.
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
A couple of days ago my PC suddenly grinded to a laggy halt. I could jerkily move the mouse around but nothing else would respond. Eventually I just switched it off at the back. I wasn't running anything particularly taxing, just an MSN conversation, a browser window and Spotify.
Upon powering back up, I was immediately warned about a CPU temperature problem. I checked in the BIOS and indeed, it read 87.5C. I suspect that one (or more) of the push pins on the heatsink popped out, as this happened once before last year and there always seems to be a lot of tension when seating it.
Anyway, I replaced the processor and heatsink with an older one (E5200, stock heatsink), and my PC worked as normal. After presumably eliminating other parts as the problem, I decided to give the original processor another shot so I replaced the thermal grease and re-installed it. Temperatures were about what I'm used to (~35C idle up to around 60C if playing a demanding game) but now the system was crashing constantly. BSODs relating to a whole range of dlls. One of the more interesting BSODs said:
The stack memory was corrupted by a device driver, likely due to attempt by malicious software to gain control of the system.
If I underclock the processor the system runs quite happily. At stock speeds it will crash consistently, sometimes before Windows can even finish loading.
I'm fairly sure that I'm going to be buying a new component (or two) before this issue is fixed, but what is the most likely problem here? Processor seems obvious but if it was really damaged the other day I wouldn't expect it to work at all.
Any feedback would be greatly appreciated.
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