Computer heat issue causing shutdown problems

[DrewKaree]

Father-in-law's computer I built him went shite.  Bad motherboard.

Miraculously, I found an identical mobo that was a TOUCH improved and would still accomodate his processor for fairly cheap at the local old-pc-junk store.  This one has auto shut off for the PC if temps go too high, and this is what's causing the problems.  It was defaulted to 85^o, and it's constantly starting to turn off.

It turns off, and emits a constant beep until the power supply on/off switch itself is turned off.  It won't stop UNTIL this is done.  I've followed ALL of the steps from the manufacturer they recommend, since others have had this problem already and posted the question at the manu's site.  No dice.

Also, it's been known to not even boot up from a cold start (meaning it's been left off and alone overnight)....same thing, starts to power up and then, long beep and shutdown.

I've removed the heatsink, lapped the base, reapplied new compound (not my first heatsink/paste process ever, so I know about how much to add), swapped out the CMOS battery following manu's instructions, jumpered the mobo to reset it, swapped out video card, swapped out memory stick, replaced the heatsink fan, ADDED a 120mm fan to suck in fresh air....no luck.  It still rises, and rises QUICKLY, to 85 degrees and shuts down.

Any ideas?  The heatsink fan runs, but doesn't ramp up the rpms when it gets hot, but ticking the fins causes it to ramp up for a bit.  It's just not a solution to keep having to stick your hand in the case every ten minutes and slow down the heatsink fan

[Bones]

Try painting the case orange, if this doesn't work I am out of suggestions.

[DrewKaree]

Try painting the case orange, if this doesn't work I am out of suggestions.

Your ass-hattery is appreciated.  I had only done the drives in orange.  I originally though that was the problem.  I'll take your suggestions into consideration

[Stingray]

Make him keep his PC in the fridge. Duh.

-S

[Jess--]

just a quick suggestion, check in the bios for fan speed warning, my own board refused to start up when I replaced the cpu fan with a slower / bigger fan, disabled fan warning in the bios and that cured it

[Santoro]

Bios update?

[DrewKaree]

just a quick suggestion, check in the bios for fan speed warning, my own board refused to start up when I replaced the cpu fan with a slower / bigger fan, disabled fan warning in the bios and that cured it

There is an auto-shutoff in case the fan shuts down, but the CPU temp is hitting the default for temp shutdown, and the fan is still running.  There's nothing about shut-off for fan speed, though, and I only swapped out the heatsink fan as a possible fix that was suggested, and replaced it with an identical fan, rpm wise. 

Bios update?  Many Bioses have adjustable heat parameters.  Can you even get far enough in the boot process to flash it?

I am not sure you are looking at heat as the root cause though..   I would look for shorts, bent pins, and other electrical oddities that might be causing a rapid heat spike.  I would also swap out the Power supply.  I'll bet it fried your previous Mobo and is trying to do the same to the new one.

Yeah, I'm gonna give that a shot today.  The current BIOS can be adjusted for CPU temp shutdown point, it just seems to me that 85 is already pretty darn high, and to make sure it was a heat issue, I sat in the BIOS and watched the temp climb several times.....81, 82, 83, 84, beeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeep!

I was gonna flash the BIOS anyhoo, but there's 3 different versions of the BIOS, and the only way to verify which one to get is to check the BACKside of the mobo for identifying numbers to determine the proper BIOS version update.  Why the HECK wouldn't they put it on the more than likely MOST visible and easy to check area of the mobo...the FRONT?

But it's definitely shutting down due to heat.  Is it just me, and 85 is fine?  I've got 4 systems running in my house, and the hottest is only running at 62, so 85 seems wicked excessive to me.

[Santoro]

Lets place bets.

[DrewKaree]

Lets place bets.  I'll wear my a$s-hat in public for a full day if it isn't a bad power supply.   

Crap, Dave, totally sorry.  I forgot to add that to my previous post.  I wasn't sure that the one I took over by him was good, so I had him buy a brand new 550W to replace his 350W yesterday.  Put your ass hat away, it was my fault you weren't informed enough.

I'm gonna get the troubleshooting page of what the manu recommended and link it here in a second.  I've done EVERY step they recommend, which is why I bring it up here hoping you can help me Obi-Wan.

Sorry again on the lack of info.

[DrewKaree]

http://www.soyousa.com/kb/kbdesc.php?id=170

It's an AMD board (Athlon XP).

[Sephroth57]

wait so you can adjust the temp for shutdown right? 85F isnt high at all! for an AMD, mine runs at around 130-140F, bump that up and problem solved

[DrewKaree]

wait so you can adjust the temp for shutdown right? 85F isnt high at all! for an AMD, mine runs at around 130-140F, bump that up and problem solved

It can be adjusted from 65-120, so your proc would shut down if it ran on this system.  Of those 4 systems I've got, 3 are AMD's.  What proc do you have that's running at those temps? His is a 1900.

[shmokes]

85 is really high if its celsius.  You shouldn't be above 55 if you're just in the BIOS.  But yeah, 85 Farenheight on an Athlon is nothing.  You might try pulling off the heatsink and cleaning all the thermal paste off with rubbing alcohol.  Then reapply some quality stuff properly and reseat that heatsink.  I've cured heat issues a couple of times by doing this.

[DrewKaree]

85 is really high if its celsius.  You shouldn't be above 55 if you're just in the BIOS.  But yeah, 85 Farenheight on an Athlon is nothing.  You might try pulling off the heatsink and cleaning all the thermal paste off with rubbing alcohol.  Then reapply some quality stuff properly and reseat that heatsink.  I've cured heat issues a couple of times by doing this.

I'll double check, but I'm almost certian it shuts off at 85 Celsius.  Not 100% certain of the C/F thing.

I already cleaned everything off and redid that crap when swapping the mobo, but I'll give it a shot again.  I used Arctic Silver.  Don't know what number/name of the specific stuff it was though.  I thought that stuff was pretty good....although it's like trying to clean baby snot off whatever it gets on.

[shmokes]

85 c is like melt your processor's core into goo hot and if it's getting anywhere near that just in the BIOS you've definitely got an improperly seated fan/heatsink.  You should really be worried if your processor is hitting 60 c even under a full load.

[RayB]

It's possible with some heatsinks to put it on backwards (which results with the heatsink only makinh half contact over the area it should be covering).

Air flow?

Temp of the room?

Most likely though: You're overclocking it. Make sure you have cpu and bus speeds set to Auto in the bios.

[DrewKaree]

It's possible with some heatsinks to put it on backwards (which results with the heatsink only makinh half contact over the area it should be covering).

I'll be checking that when I pull the mobo out of the case.  It was WAY harder to get the heatsink on this time, but it's cuz I was worried about slipping and hitting a cap those dunces put too close to the processor area.  Thanks for the idea though.

As for air flow, in an attempt to cool the thing down, he had the side off and a 20" box fan blowing into the case.  The room temp WAS hot a few weeks ago, but it's in the 50's here now, making the room temp 60-65, and he won't be turning the heat on for a few weeks.

It's gonna be coming into the house in a half-hour or so, and I'll look at the settings again and run down the list of stuff to re-try

[pointdablame]

85 has to be in fahrenheit... and that is not hot at all for an Athlon. 

Adjust those settings up to 120F or 55/60C

[Havok]

Make sure it's not near a heater duct - saw that problem on a client's pc once.

[Harry Potter]

Sounds like the temperature sensor under the CPU may be flocked. Or like the others say, you have your auto shut-off temp set too low.

[Santoro]

Lets place bets. I'll wear my a$s-hat in public for a full day if it isn't a bad power supply.

Crap, Dave, totally sorry. I forgot to add that to my previous post. I wasn't sure that the one I took over by him was good, so I had him buy a brand new 550W to replace his 350W yesterday. Put your ass hat away, it was my fault you weren't informed enough.Sorry again on the lack of info.

NP- I made my statement based on the facts at hand, right?

[DrewKaree]

Ok.  It's definitely celsius, and it's shutting off when it hits 85.  I was incorrect on the LOW end, the temp shutoff goes from 50 to 120 celsius. 

Also, to add more info to the mix, it's been doing this the past few days:  It'll give the solid nonstop beep and shutdown before ever seeing a POST screen.  Several times.  Then, out of the blue, doing NOTHING different other than pressing the power button for what seems like the millionth time, it'll boot, with no problems.  EVERY time I go into the BIOS, upon exit it does the long beep/shutdown on me.

Here's a few snaps of the BIOS showing the default shutoff, the upper limits, and the temp on die as it was when booting.  Keep in mind, this temperature was read AFTER four unsuccessful attempts to start the computer.  4 long beep/shutdown's, and the fifth time allowed me to boot and enter BIOS.  Upon changing FSB to Auto, it long beep/shutdown on me again.  I currently am undoing everything so I can remove the mobo and check the backside to get the info needed to know which BIOS update to DL. 

I'll take a pic of the proc and how the heatsink is sitting on it if I think it looks good to see what everyone thinks.

[Sephroth57]

well that 57C isnt too bad, but youre saying it actually hits 85?

[Santoro]

If flashing to the newest verison of the BIOS doesn't help here, I'd say it is definitely an electircal gremlin that is going to be really hard to trace.

[DrewKaree]

well that 57C isnt too bad, but youre saying it actually hits 85?

Yeah.  When it finally starts and boots into Windows, it'll end up reaching 85 and shutting down.  No rhyme or reason as to how long it'll take to shut down.

Yesterday it ran for 25 minutes before it shut down.  When we finally got it back up and operational, I forgot to shut it down after checking my football scores online.  I went upstairs at the end of the game to check 'em again and realized I hadn't shut it down and it had been running the whole time - about 2 hours.

That link above lists the exact problem it's having, but nothing suggested at that link worked, except I haven't removed the new old thermal paste I put on when swapping mobos.

[DrewKaree]

If flashing to the newest verison of the BIOS doesn't help here, I'd say it is definitely an electircal gremlin that is going to be really hard to trace.    Something like a bad temp sensor as suggested earlier, blown component on the Mobo, or worse, a bad CPU. 

Are you ever able to get into your OS? 

Yeah, I can get to the OS.  I'm actually hoping that when I can remove the mobo, I'll see that it's on the proc half-cocked like RayB suggests.  Something easy.  If this isn't fixable soon, I told my Father-in-law I'd take him to our local PC store and help him sort out what he'll need for them to build him a new PC.  They sell new towers starting at $300, and he won't need a power supply, optical drives, or video card, so he can probably get down to the $200 range, and I've got whatever flavor OS he could possibly want.  I won't let him sink another dime into this thing if I can't get it working.

[RayB]

Note: You can't tell if the heatsink is backwards until you remove it.

[DrewKaree]

Note: You can't tell if the heatsink is backwards until you remove it.

Sure ya can.  The little "cutout" is visible and it's on the correct way.

I dunno.  I cleaned all the old paste off, it wasn't bridging any contacts, I splooged some more on there and fastened 'er all back up.  I've got the numbers from the back of the mobo for a BIOS upgrade, and I think shortly, I'll take this whole mess back downstairs and fire it up outside the box and see if it works before buttoning anything back up. 

Oh, and I checked and it wasn't shorting itself to the case anywhere.

Here's hoping shmokes wins the prize for idea that works

NOTHING seems out of the ordinary. 

[DrewKaree]

Note: You can't tell if the heatsink is backwards until you remove it.

Sure ya can.  The little "cutout" is visible and it's on the correct way.

[DrewKaree]

I moved the shut-off temp up to 120 after setting up, and started it up and left it running downstairs.  I just checked on it 3 hours later, and it hasn't shut down.  It hasn't been running Windows, I've only had it in the BIOS, since that's the only place I have a CPU temperature gauge.

The effing thing is running at 86^o Celsius.  That just seems WAY too hot to be constantly running at, not to mention I've not taxed it AT ALL.  Sitting in BIOS shouldn't be causing temps that high, right?

All I did was splooge more heatsink thermal paste on there after cleaning the old stuff off, and reseat everything.  There's PLENTY of room around the chip, so I splooged extra heatsink compound on there on the offchance that it might help.  Ended up using a touch more than a pea-sized dollop, which is about double the amount of what's NEVER given me trouble in the past.

Brand new from-the-box parts tested in there include:

Video card (from the extra I bought for MAME)
Power Supply
Heatsink fan, replaced and aligned exactly as the old one
Memory stick (from my shipment of parts today, thankfully.)

I seriously don't feel comfortable setting the temp shut off for something like 100 just to keep this thing running.  It seems WAY too hot for safety and seems like it's asking for trouble.

[pointdablame]

MORE thermal compound won't help.  In fact, too much will only hurt.  You want just enough for a thin sheet of compound.  The compounds purpose is to fill any minute crevaces in teh core and heatsink so that you get maximum thermal conductivity and thus maximum heat getting the heck OFF the cpu.

[DrewKaree]

I can take some off.  Like I said, what's worked dozens of times in the past seems to not be working, so I figured I'd add a bit more.  Wasn't double, or even a real noticeable amount, but I can take some off.

86 too high?  Seems when it's higher than the default, even by 1 degree, it's way too hot to me.  Esepcially compared to 4 currently running problem-free PC's.

[shmokes]

I really have to wonder whether the thermometer isn't feeding you a line.  I don't have a lot of experience with overclocking and only ever burned up a single CPU core.  I think it was an Athlon 1800 and the motherboard didn't monitor temperatures, but only fan speed.  It would shut down the computer automatically if the fan suddenly shut off, for example.  Well, what happened is one of the two plastic tabs that the heatsink hooks to the socket with snapped off so the entire heatsink/fan assembly fell onto the videocard but, importantly, remained plugged into the motherboard and spinning.  So the computer just kept running thinking everything was fine, for I don't know how many seconds, but when I got to it, it had burned to death.  The user said that is computer suddenly locked up, then he smelled smoke.

So anyway, I can't say from personal experience what should happen at 85 degrees, but it seems to me that your processor should already be fried running for any significant amount of time on temps like that, from what I've read.  Do you know anyone with an infrared thermometer that you could point inside the case? 

In any case, if you've got a properly seated heatsink/fan with a thin layer of thermal paste (a razor blade works great for spreading the stuff across the core) your temperatures shouldn't be anywhere near that high.  I know you put the front side bus speed on auto, but did you check the voltage?

Instead of setting the clock multiplier and FSB to auto I think you should set it all manually, in case it is being incorrectly identified by the motherboard.  This is going to be slightly harder for your chip because AMD moved to a .13 micron process just when those chips were on the market and didn't differentiate the name, so you could have a Athlon 1900 with a Thunderbird core or one with a newer Palomino core and there's no way of knowing by looking at the product name.  The problem is, the core voltage for a Palomino core is 1.75v (I think), but that's much too high for a Thunderbird core and will cause it to run way too hot.  Maybe that's what's happening.  You can tell by looking at the chip which core you have (thunderbirds is nearly square, while Palomino's is more rectangular), but here's a site that you can plug in the numbers printed right on the chip and it will tell you everything you need to know, including FSB, Clock Multiplier and Voltage settings, as well as what core your chip has:

http://mp3.zonebg.com/cpu/cpu.php#

[duffjr]

85 c is like melt your processor's core into goo hot and if it's getting anywhere near that just in the BIOS you've definitely got an improperly seated fan/heatsink.  You should really be worried if your processor is hitting 60 c even under a full load.

my friend's pc was running at 95 for a weak till everything burned.  it turned out to be the power supply and badly mounted heat sink.  he had pc club fix it, but they f-ed it up even more, so he had to pay 1000 in service mostly because he didn't want to wait for the warranty replacements.

[DrewKaree]

I really have to wonder whether the thermometer isn't feeding you a line.  I don't have a lot of experience with overclocking and only ever burned up a single CPU core.

I've also wondered that, because I've built a dozen+ PC's, including the first build of this very PC, plus I don't even monkey around with overclocking, and I've NEVER had issues like this thing is giving me. 

Do you know anyone with an infrared thermometer that you could point inside the case? 

No dice on that front.  I DID find out today that my father-in-law likes to interchange whatever computer words he learns without realizing they actually MEAN something.  "Download" is NOT the same as "install", "virus" is not the same thing as "spyware", and MOTHERBOARD FAN is not the same as HEATSINK FAN!

I made him check his records for a warranty for what he initially told me was DEFINITELY a heatsink fan he had replaced, and it turns out they swapped out the fan he had on the northbridge chip.  While he was at the store, he couldn't remember what I wanted him to ask them to check his service records for, and I got to speak to the actual tech who serviced his computer when he took it in, and told the tech my F-I-L needs to buy a new heatsink fan for that same setup.  He's dropping it off shortly, and if that doesn't work, I'm gonna assume the temp sensor isn't right, and simply up the shut-off temps. 

I've already told him this is the solution we're going to take if the fan doesn't work, and he should start saving his money to replace his PC so that if/when this breaks down (if it's an actual heat issue), he'll be ready to replace it with very little downtime.

Thanks for the info on the site to run the chip info through.  I'm almost positive it's a Palomino, but why not double check, right?  I think one of those pics above listed the voltage it's running at, I didn't check before posting.  When setting the FSB to Auto, it DID step up to 142, vs. the 133 it's supposed to be running at.

Well, I'm essentially considering this problem solved today, since I'll either get it operational at a lower temp reading with all the help from you guys, or I'll be boosting the shut-off temp so it's serviceable for him until he tells me it's time to replace his now-broke PC.  I'll post what the final "solution" turns out to be one way or the other.

[DrewKaree]

http://mp3.zonebg.com/cpu/cpu.php#

 Athlon XP Processor    
 Core    Palomino
 CPU Model    6
 Manufacturing Process    180 nm
 Approximate Transistor Count    37.5 million
 Approximate Die Size    128 sq. mm
 Performance Rating    1900+
 Working frequency    1600 MHz
 Package Type    OPGA
 Operating Voltage    1.75 V
 Max Die Temperature    90

[shmokes]

Those pictures hurt my eyes.  They're like those obnoxious t-shirts about being drunk.

[DrewKaree]

I can't be bothered to spend $18 on a tripod, and the Parkinson's is a plus when mixing paint

[SOAPboy]

http://www.soyousa.com/kb/kbdesc.php?id=170

It's an AMD board (Athlon XP).

LOL!

Thats teh same board i used to have.. had the same f'ing issues

Bios update
Go into bios, shut OFF the autoshut off
Get another fan or two..

That board is "nice" but its also a pain in the ass.. :-|

[DrewKaree]

http://www.soyousa.com/kb/kbdesc.php?id=170

It's an AMD board (Athlon XP).

LOL!

Thats teh same board i used to have.. had the same f'ing issues

Bios update
Go into bios, shut OFF the autoshut off
Get another fan or two..

That board is "nice" but its also a pain in the ass.. :-|

'mbout to go downstairs and check the temps on it in a sec.  I just picked the "Symptom" page.  The board is a KT600 Dragon Plus 1.0

I had thrown a 120mm in there when he first had the issues....he threw a 20" box fan at the open sides.  Effing boards.  Soyo seemed to have decent boards from the 400 series to this, but man, they really soured me on using them again since this seems to be a COMMON issue with a bunch of their boards.  If the temps are cool, and it stays running in Windows, I'll be doing a BIOS update tomorrow.