Too toasty - help!

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28 Jan 2005
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Got a bit of prob with my rig, looking for advice on possible reasons for the problem please. Sorry in advance for long post! (Spec in sig.)

On Saturday, was using the PC in the morning, everything working fine, temps all normal (using MBM5.) Shut it down, went back to it a couple of hours later, evrything seemed normal. Left it to go answer the front door when the kitchen fitter arrived, suddenly hearing beeping. MBM alarm is showing the CPU temp as 70C :eek:. At idle. Double :eek:

Ran Speedfan, used the various logs in MBM and Speedfan - all the fans are running normally, SMART on the single HDD is reporting a temp of about 45C, RAID array doesn't get picked up though, the GPU drivers say it's running 52C, MBM says the air temp in the case in the mid-50s, the CPU in the high 60-s.

Shut it down, left it a bit. Rebooted and the temps look normal. But they climb steadily but slowly so that after about five minutes, the CPU is running at 70C and the air temp in the case is in the 50-s again. That's with leaving the system idle the whole time.

Yesterday the wife rebooted when she saw the alarm (even though I'd asked her not to use it but stick to the laptop!) but then left it running. We were in the lounge when I heard the BIOS beep. Strange. Then it did it again about 10 secs later. So it's obviously reset itself twice. Had a look at the temps - cpu now at 80C :eek:

Was trying to change the config on MBM to shutdown the pc when the temp hits the alarm (it won't let me, anyone know how to this properly?) when suddenly it BSODs! Can't remember the exact phrase now but it was something like "page fault in non-paged area." The stop code was 0x0...050 (can't remember how it's structured, just remember it ended in 50)

Can't actually get near the pc to strip it down as I'm in the middle of decorating and there's stuff everywhere, but the fans all appear to be running normally, just something is getting too toasty!

Any ideas? Help!!!
 
The "page fault in non-paged area" might be something to do with the windows page file (aka the swap file or virtual RAM). I *think* you can probably just delete it and then reboot. I'm sure there will be lots of info on goodgle to be found.

As for the temp problem. sounds much more serious. If you are decorating does that mean that you have moved the computer around recently? Or is there a lot of dust everywhere?
Perhaps your CPU heat sink has been knocked/loosened so is not cooling the CPU properly. Or a case exhaust fan might have stopped (might explain the high case air temps).
 
Page file is on its own partition so I'll try that. Ta.

The pc has not been moved as its the bedrooms I'm doing up, not the area the pc lives, so the HSF shouldn't be affected. The fans don't sound any different (and they're not quiet ones either...) but until I can get access to tower again I can't really check. Not that I can't get to the pc, just that with all the books, bedside cabinets etc lying about that area there's no room to strip the tower down.

Just strange that it was perfectly normal, then suddenly is going through the roof. Wondered if something was dying maybe...
 
Finally got the chance to open the box up at the weekend. Found the problem straight away.

None of the case fans were spinning. They're plugged into a dedicated "fan only" molex straight off the PSU. Plugged them into a "normal" molex and they fired up. Then noticed that neither of the two fans in the PSU itself were spinning either.

So basically there was no airflow inside the case at all. Absolutely nothing exhausting the hot air!

Left the fans in attached to a normal molex (had to lose one of the optical drives to free one up though) and now all is well. In fact it's cooler than before (CPU by about 12C!!) cause the case fans are running full speed instead of temp-controlled speed and the intake fan pushes 125CFM. (I was never totally convinced the temp sensor worked properly anyway.)

Plus noticed a dodgy connection on the molex connected to one of the drives in my RAID0 array causing the drive to restart every few seconds - swaped that with the one for the DVDRW. Guess the blue screen was down to the RAID array suddenly disappearing.

Hope it's not out of warranty!
 
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