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Heat Problem Causing Freezing

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My computer has developed a strange freezing due to overheating.
It was built in 7/2009 and has ran flawlessly most of the time
24/7. About and month or so ago I would be running any program,
Virus Scan, Spreadsheet etc. no games and for no reason it would
freeze up including stopping playing music. No keyboard input or
mouse use would work. I'd power down and it would run 3-30 minutes
and freeze up again.

My equipment: Thermaltake VH600BWS Armor Full-Tower Case
` ASUS P6T Motherboard
Seagate 1.5 TB HD 3x
Seagate 750GB HD 1x
Plextor BluRay Burner
Plextor Lightscribe Burner
Intel I7 920 CPU
Corsair XMS3 Tri Channel 6GB 1333Mhz DDR3
6x2048
Corsair HX850W 850W Modular Power Supply
Radeon 4870 HD X2 Graphics Card
NH-U12P SE1366 CPU Cooler

As to Fans, 200mm side exhaust, 2x 80mm HD fans, 120mm rear exhaust,
140mm bottom exhaust and 140mm top exhaust.

All my temperatures are normal except for the graphics card it was
running 81-83 deg. I went into Catalyst switched to manual drop the
speed to 650Mhz from 800Mhz and increased the fan from 50% to 75%
and the temp. dropped from 80C to 57C. But no joy it still froze up.

CPU runs from 39C to 43C and HDs run at 41-45C.

Now my temporary solution, I took off the side of the case and put
a 10" table fan at low pointing inside about 6 inches from the computer
and it has run great, no freezing 24/7 for the last 4 days! Motherboard?

Thanks
Tom Collins

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Homebuilt system Expert

Nice oxymoron thread title. ;) 

Presumably when you've been running this system with the table fan for 4 days you've been doing intensive tasks right? Just using windows won't tax your system enough. Try running 3DMark and watch the GPU temperatures.

It may be worthwhile reseating the components just to avoid thermal creep. Ensure all the fans are spinning without issue and any filters are free from dust. If your case is particularly clogged picking up some canned air to clean it up is a good idea.

Do you have temperature readings for north and south bridge chips?
Homebuilt system Expert

Heat sink compound on most cpus will usually solidify or burn off after a couple of years, same thing happened to my Celeron-M laptop....

watch any videos, it would overheat in 10 minutes....
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Well I took your advice and ran a movie DVD, on the second screen ran my normal stock market ticker, Forex, and analysis of stocks/mutual funds. Also on the first screen with the movie I brought up Firefox, IE9, started a chkfdsk on one of the unused drives plus brought up iTunes and started playing some music.

CPU went to 44c from 41c
GPU went to 56c from 53c
System stayed at 52c
MB stayed at 52c

If the Artic Silver 5 was the problem shouldn't I see spiked or erractic CPU temps?

I'm going to do a stress on the cpu and gpu using 3dmark and prime95 and see what
happens.

Tom

Best solution

The CPU and GPU temperatures dont seem to catch my eye but system and motherboard temperatures seem high to say the least. You should air down the motherboard and components to clear any dust away from components. It seems to me that theres probably dust clogged up on your motherboard around the north and south bridges, as well as everything else potentially.

Well I took all suggestions and still have a heat problem. I ran 3DMark and PCMark Vantage then Memtest86 with the fan all was ok, when I shut the external fan off it froze.

So, maybe the a memory stick is bad (Corsair TR3XG1333C9) is bad. I removed 3 to drop it to 6GB and the computer ran fine (all three tests) with no fan. I added another for 8GB and again all ran fine. When I put the remaining two in the computer wouldn't even boot, it powered up but no disk or display activity.

When I bought the parts for this computer I ordered an extra package of memory by mistake. So I tried them in the last two slots with the same results no boot, no disk activity.

For insurance I replaced the 200mm side fan with a more powerful one >100cfm and using it blowing towards the motherboard.

That's it for now. I'm not giving up on the last two memory sticks yet.

Tom

Well, waiting for a new MoBo. I checked all the PS voltages everything is stable. Since my last post the computer is getting worse so for now it sits waiting for the MoBo. Glad I bought this ASUS G51 notebook and have a ASUS netbook for travel.

Tom

Got the new MoBo in and when I took out the old one I examined it carefully and found one of the heatsinks (North/SouthBridge) on one corner up off the chip by almost 1/4 to 1/2 inch. It was held in with a plastic push pin spring loaded and it had come loose. Should have listened to MightEMatt remarks about MoBo temp and examined this closer. Oh well, lesson learned.

Tom
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