[PLUG] Newly assembled machine overheating

Richard C. Steffens rsteff at comcast.net
Fri Sep 22 22:49:51 UTC 2006


I have an overheating processor chip (thank you chip and mother board 
makers for adding temperature sensing and alarms) and need some ideas on 
what might be causing the problem.

I've just assembled a machine:

Soyo IT600 Dragon Ultra mother board with an AMD Athlon XP 2200+ 
processor and a thermaltake Silent Boost chip fan. I used thermal 
grease. The mother board was slightly used, with a different chip, by a 
fellow PLUGer. My processor chip is new, from Computer Geeks.

After checking all the connections, I fired up the machine and got the 
mother board splash screen, hit <DEL> and got into the BIOS. I went 
through the list and found most everything OK the way it was -- I just 
re-ordered the boot sequence (CD-ROM first, Floppy second, HDD, third) 
and disabled the splash screen so I could see what's going on under the 
hood.

That worked fine, and I could see the CPU temperature and the fact that 
the alarm was enabled so I'd know when to start worrying about the CPU 
getting too hot.

It took a fairly long time to finally get around to booting, but 
eventually the SuSE 10.1 install CD booted. I entered the FTP site and 
waited another fairly long time for the process to begin. Just as it 
did, the alarm went off. I aborted the installation and rebooted. The 
processor chip temperature was 44deg C. I recall that the limit is 45, 
so I shut down the machine.

I set the box up on the desk, took the cover off, power it up and 
watched to see if the CPU fan was running: it was, as was the chip set 
fan, the power supply fan, and the two additional case fans.

The only unusual thing that occurred during assembly was that when I 
poked a little hole in the thermal grease packet I must have made two 
holes, one front and one back. I watched a small amount of grease come 
out the front hole, but didn't see about twice as much come out the 
back. The extra grease ran off the chip top and down onto the chip's 
carrier board. There are some little bumps of something that are next to 
the chip top. The grease got on and in between those. I used a q-tip to 
clean up most of it. I was sure to leave grease on the chip top, but I 
don't really know how much there should be.

Any recommendations on what to do next?

-- 
Regards,

Dick Steffens




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