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How fooked is my mobo?

dmention7

dmention7

Hater
Backstory: I suddenly started noticing some weird symptoms and general system instability that I thought might be either a virus or the HD crapping the bed. After several hours of dicking around with antivirus, HD/system recovery software, and formatting/reinstalling windows I thought I had the problem licked, only to have the symptoms pop back up while reinstalling drivers and updating windows. Round 2 of format/reinstall was giving me problems almost right off the bat. Wasn't until then that I noticed the chipset fan was siezed up.

Out of curiosity, I tried letting everything cool down and then fired it back up. Before windows even could finish booting, the chipset heatsink was hot enough that I couldn't touch it. I take it, it might be time to throw in the towel on this mobo, or do those things normally run pretty hot?
 
Workdawg

Workdawg

NARWHAL
Depends on the cpu and such, but CPU's can run upwards of 55C.

According a quick google search, it seems likely that you could get burned at that temp.

That said... overheating could certainly cause strange issues with your PC. If you can get the old fan working, or mount a new fan. I'd say go for it and see if that fixes it completely. If not, you'll need a new CPU and probably a new mobo.

One thing to note: if you take the heatsink off of the CPU, you'll need to reapply a thermal compound between the CPU and heatsink or it won't work correctly anymore.
 
Picklz

Picklz

SUDO Make me a SAMCH
Chipset fan or CPU fan? Two very different items.
Either way a failed fan certainly could cause the issue you are having. A CPU fan FOR SURE will and just replacing the fan and/or Heatsink+Fan should take care of your issues, as Dan said you will need to clean the surface of the chip and apply new thermal compound if you replace the whole heatsink assembly, it's cheap from newegg or wherever, otherwise I'm sure I have some laying around here somewhere.

If it's the chipset fan, that 'could' be the problem, some chipsets don't run all that hot, and / or are designed to run fine under passive cooling, especially if not overclocked, others all but require active cooling. Poor stability is often the first sign you've hit a thermal limit either under normal use or while overclocking.

Either way, unless you want an excuse to upgrade, I suspect a cheap fan or heatsink+fan may very well take care of your issue.

Whichever item it is if you want to get me the model of the Motherboard, and what kind of CPU it is if its the cpu heatsink/fan thats out, I may have some parts to help you out.
 
1Kris06

1Kris06

MAD LIGHTS YO
Workdawg said:
Depends on the cpu and such, but CPU's can run upwards of 55C.

According a quick google search, it seems likely that you could get burned at that temp.

That said... overheating could certainly cause strange issues with your PC. If you can get the old fan working, or mount a new fan. I'd say go for it and see if that fixes it completely. If not, you'll need a new CPU and probably a new mobo.

One thing to note: if you take the heatsink off of the CPU, you'll need to reapply a thermal compound between the CPU and heatsink or it won't work correctly anymore.
Click to expand...
sidenote, i need some thermal compound for my ps3. where does one acquire this stuff?
 
D

DrWebster

Guest
General Nanosystems in St. Paul or Microcenter in St. Louis Park will definitely have thermal paste. Otherwise, Newegg.

Jay, replace the fan and you'll probably be fine. Most motherboards these days have multiple thermal sensors located in various places on the board, including the CPU and chipset, and if any of them reach a critical point the system will shut itself down. Sidewinder (www.sidewindercomputers.com) is a shop that pretty much focuses on system cooling (especially water-cooling), so they have a wide variety of fans.
 
dmention7

dmention7

Hater
I did indeed mean the chipset fan. It's a Asus A8N-SLI socket 939 mobo with a Athlon64 FX-55 CPU; not sure if that's sufficient info or not. I can certainly take a look for a more detailed model if need be. The fan is a tiny little bugger (obviously) that actually is recessed into the heatsink, but it looks like I could probably strap a 40mm fan to the heatsink if need be.

By way of a few more details, I never actually had the system fully shut down on me (like I've had happen when a CPU or GPU overheats). The main symptoms were that a PCI wireless adapter and an IDE optical drive were suddenly no longer recognized by windows, and windows would hang for several minutes (while the HD activity light showed constantly on), and then become increasingly unresponsive.


But it sounds like it's at least worth a try to get some cooling back on the chipset. Worst case, it looks like a new mobo would run me under $60 on ebay. Apparently they didn't make a whole lot of socket 939 boards either...
 
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