On then off, help troubleshooting please

[doublea81]

First post, really looking for some guidance... so all help greatly appreciated.

I built my current desktop back in 2006... been great, working fine, no issues until about a week ago. Coincidentally when the weather around here (northeast), started getting hot.

The symptoms... starting shutting off in the evenings after running all day. Then after trying to turn back on, turns off within 5 minutes. This has only gotten worse and as of now, turns on for a few minutes or less and shuts itself off.

I installed speedfan earlier today and one of cores was reading hot and would not cool down. So I took off the cooler and blasted out all the dust, as well as from the rest of the fans. No dice, same stuff going on.

Any thoughts? Just get a new power supply and see if that is the issue? Motherboard? CPU? I am at a loss. Specs are below if it helps at all.

-ASUS A8N-SLI 939 NVIDIA nForce4 SLI ATX AMD Motherboard
-EVGA 256-P2-N563-AX GeForce 7900GT 256MB 256-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16
-AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ Toledo 2.2GHz Socket 939 Dual-Core Processor
- CORSAIR XMS 2GB (2 x 1GB) 184-Pin DDR SDRAM DDR 400 (PC 3200) Dual Channel WINX2048-3200
-Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 ST3160812AS 160GB 7200 RPM SATA 3.0Gb/s

 

[JMer806]

When you removed the stock heatsink, did you clean all of the old thermal paste off of it and apply new? To me this sounds like a CPU overheating problem (in fact I just dealt with a very similar problem on my old Core 2 Quad rig).

Assuming you have done the thermal paste and all correctly (if you haven't, then try that first, here's a handy guide: http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/333968-28-thermal-paste-removal-installation-guide), then see if you can find a cheap aftermarket CPU cooler and try that. It could be that the stock heatsink is no longer functioning properly.

 

[doublea81]

no i didnt remove and reapply new paste... i thought about it but I do not have any. I will start there and see what happens. thanks.

 

[JMer806]

No worries. Yeah, since you didn't put on new thermal paste, this is 99% an overheating issue. The thermal paste is important, so make sure to put some on. A tube good for 6-8 uses should run you about $10-15 at Frys, probably less online.

ETA: And make sure to remove the old paste first. It will cause problems if left on. Follow the guide I posted above and you'll be golden