This is of probably interest only to my personal techy friends, so I apologize to the rest of you for clogging your RSS readers. Remember back when I was griping about my tech problems in June? Well, the PC issue has been solved it seems, and it wasn’t the motherboard. I replaced my mobo (an A8n-SLI) with a newer cheaper one (piece of crap by comparison), and had similar issues. Finally it hit me: the CPU is overheating. I booted to BIOS and watched the temp climb from 35C to 85C and die in 45 minutes. I cleaned the fan, and replaced the thermal paste, and watched it climb that high in 5 minutes. Oops. So I bought a $15 fan/heatsink that’s twice as large as the old one, and guess what? This time the temp went DOWN to 32C. The good news is my PC lives again. The bad news is I went without it for over 4 months when I could’ve fixed it for $15. Oh well. Live and learn.
Erik Marshall
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Good news. And thanks to the barrage of questions I asked during that four month period, I sort of even understand what you’re saying.
Was it a heatsync issue or a CPU issue? I hope it doesn’t act up again.
Well, it was a heatsink/fan issue apparently. The CPU was overheating as a result of insufficient cooling. So far so good.