CPU Overheating

[drisay]

I am currently having a problem with my PC at home and I believe it has to do with my CPU overheating.

First of all, what happens is after approx. 1 hour of work, my pc freezes up. If I restart it, it will freeze at random times within a few minutes of booting. By freeze I mean that the screen stays the same, but I can no longer do anything and it won't come back... so I'm not getting any kernel errors, I've tried reinstalling cause I initially thought it could be the OS.

My CPU is a athlon thunderbird 800.

Question: How can I debug this problem? What should be a ok temperature for this chip to run at? What is a dangerous temperature? In your opinion, is it even a CPU issue? Anythin else I could check?

Thanks in advance to anyone who can help,
André.

 

[o1die]

You can check your temps using mbm 5370, a free download. You can select your motherboard from an extensive list, and it will configure the program to your board. Your cpu should be running at 40-55 celcius. You can clean and reinstall the heatsink, using thermal paste on the cpu die (center) only. I only use a tiny dab. Less is better. I would also check your other fans, on the video card and case. I recently installed a sparkle 300w power supply with 12cm side fan, and my cpu temps dropped at least 5 degrees celcius. It's only $28 at newegg.

 

[Mr5oh]

Deffaintly try re-installing your CPU, with some new thermal paste. Anything below 60° C is acceptable, though with your processor, you should be below this. 80° C is the danger point, you don't want to be up around this temp.

Since you have already re-installed the OS, the CPU temp would probably be the next prime suspect. As mentioned above, check all your other fans, and clean out an excess dust.

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[Guest]

bah silicon wont melt before 130 or so....
Altough id be worried if my cpu was at 80
I doubt you can kill your cpu with anything under 100c(short term). If you keep running it for a longer time at 80c its gonna wear off faster...And you might have stability problem with anything over 70c

Asus P4P800DX, P4C 2.6ghz@3.25ghz, 2X512 OCZ PC4000 3-4-4-8, Leadtek FX5900 w/ FX5950U bios@500/1000, 2X30gig Raid0<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by labbbby on 08/25/04 03:26 PM.</EM></FONT></P>

 

[apache_lives]

Your prolly still using the thermal pad that most cpu hsf's come with - get rid of it. Instead of worrying about overheating just yet - check your bios (or reset bios defaults), lower ram timings to CL3, check the ram and if posible switch and see what happens stability wise... you could use prime95 to see what errors appear.

Oh yeah - labbbby - how did you get your 2.6c to 3.25 stabily? my 2.6 wont go past 3.12 without prime95 errors even at 1.7v.

 

[Cybercraig]

You're probably running a Via KT-133 chipset motherboard. I had an A7V with a 800 T-bird with some similar problem on Win98SE. For some reason, when I upgraded to WinXP all my problems went away. I have since upgraded that board to a 1.3ghz T-Bird and use it as a back-up PC.

Abit IS7 - 2.8C @ 3.4ghz - Mushkin PC4000 (2 X 512) - Sapphire 9800Pro - TT 420 watt Pure Power
Samsung 120gb ATA-100 - Maxtor 40gb ATA - 100
Sony DRU-510A - Yellowtail Merlot

 

[drisay]

Yeah, I have the A7V board as well. Although I am running on windows 2000 currently and have tried windows xp, but had the same issues. I'd really like to upgrade, but unfortunately funds aren't permitting at this time... maybe a simple upgrade of mb drivers and utilities could help?

 

[drisay]

Thanks so much for everyone's quick replies. I'll try out what you guys have suggested and hopefully something will work out.

 

[Cybercraig]

That chip runs stock around 130F as I remember. When I switched mine to a 1.3 I put a Vivanni cooler on it and the temps dropped. I think you should be running to 1006 or 1007 BIOS by now. I had a lot of Via issues with 1003 and the Radeon 7000. Most of them were 4-in-1 driver issues.

Abit IS7 - 2.8C @ 3.4ghz - Mushkin PC4000 (2 X 512) - Sapphire 9800Pro - TT 420 watt Pure Power
Samsung 120gb ATA-100 - Maxtor 40gb ATA - 100
Sony DRU-510A - Yellowtail Merlot