Mobo auto shuts down PC when cpu temps are PERCEIVED to be too high

[Xzar]

my friend's has the Asus P5Q mobo:
http://ca.asus.com/Motherboards/Intel_Socket_775/P5Q/

A q9650 intel quadcore cpu (not overclocked, with stock cooler)

the mobo has malfunctioning temp sensors, and even right after the PC is booted, the cpu core is measured at 75 degrees Celsius in the BIOS.

While we are solely using Google Chrome to watch streams, Speedfan shows the temp of each core to vary between 85 degrees and 100 degrees

All these temps are simply impossible, since the maximum safe temp of the 19650 is 71.4 degrees according to Intel's official site:

http://ark.intel.com/products/35428/Intel-Core2-Quad-Processor-Q9650-%2812M-Cache-3_00-GHz-1333-MHz-FSB%29

So is there an easy way to tell this P5Q mobo to stop automatically shutting down the PC out of precaution?

Other possible culprits of this weird shut down situation COULD be the video card or power supply. But they aren't as likely culprits as the mobo autoshutting down as a safety measure based on malfunctioning temp sensors.

-4870 sapphire video card. GPU-Z says that idle temp is 72 degrees. We're not playing games or anything, right when the PC boots it's 72 degrees. But the max safe temp of the 4870 is 120 degrees, so 72 degrees is still in the safe zone.

Another possible but unlikely culprit could be the Antec 550 Watts power supply. I think it's this model:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817371002

It's 2 years and 8 months old. But we aren't stressing the machine at all. Just watching streams. The BIOS voltage sensors states that all the voltages are within the correct values. For example, 12v line is listed at 12.1v.

However, Speedfan lists +12v at 12.1v, while -12v is listed at -11.4 volts if i recall correctly. Still, fluctuating voltage values seem to be common in Speedfan. My 2 years old SeaSonic SS-550HT lists +12v at 12.54 or 12.48v, while -12v varies between -10.55v and -12.11v. Yet my PC functions fine.

It's an open PC case, with an additional outside fan blowing on the system. The cpu cooler is stock.

I've updated the mobo BIOS and installed the most recent video card drivers, still a problem. He is using Windows XP 32 bit.

If anyone knows how to tell the mobo to stop shutting the system down automatically, please let me know. Thanks.

 

[jsc]

Is the heatsink properly installed? You may need to pull the motherboard from the case to check.

 

[Xzar]

Thanks for the reply.

Before I got a chance to do anything, my friend freed a lot of disk space on the partition containing his Operating System. Then he ran CCleaner to remove 1 GB of temporary files. Then his computer worked fine again.

Prior to all of this, and also prior to my inspection of his PC, he had already ran a full virus scan.

So SOFTWARE can cause a computer to shut down like this? Imagine my surprise.

 

[Raiddinn]

Computers need a certain amount of free space on a hard drive in order to operate correctly. If you use every available byte then it could cause a crash, yes.

I would suggest the person tries to free up at least 15% of the drive's maximum size, especially if it is a boot drive. Not that I am going to encourage people to fill their data drives to 100% capacity, but doing so is less bad than doing it to a boot drive.

The person should probably try to delete more files and do a defrag in the near future if freeing up 1GB is enough to get operations back to normal.

That being said, buggy software is most definitely capable of crashing PCs. Indeed it has been historically one of the biggest players in the things that crash computers.

Here, we kinda usually blame this thing on bad drivers which isn't what you would traditionally consider "software", but it is often true that a perfectly good program just doesn't know how to use an older driver.

In such cases, the program should probably be re-written in order to have backward compatibility, but a lot of times it is just easier for us to tell people to update drivers than it is for us to tell people to run a different program that works with their current driver.

Indeed, I would hazard a guess that more than 50% of all crashes that people have historically had since the invention of Windows have been related to buggy software. Maybe even more than 80%.

We don't tend to hear about such things often here, because people can usually tell if it is one specific game or whatever that crashes their computer and they don't bring it to hardware techs, but that doesn't mean such problems aren't extremely common and we just don't hear about them.

 

[Xzar]

Indeed, I would hazard a guess that more than 50% of all crashes that people have historically had since the invention of Windows have been related to buggy software. Maybe even more than 80%.

Hi, when you say crash, do you mean a blue screen of death/Operating System freezing, with the electricity still running?

Or do you mean a complete system shutdown with the power turning off?

Yeah, I've told him to leave some free space on the OS drive before, but since he got away with using XP on a sub 1GB free space drive on his old pentium 4 PC for years, he got complacent lol. Thanks for the detailed reply!

 

[Raiddinn]

If the power turns off, it is usually a PSU problem.

I mostly meant the other kind.

 

[Xzar]

Best answer selected by Xzar.

 

[Mousemonkey]

This topic has been closed by Mousemonkey