Troubleshooting possible CPU problem

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Joined
15 Oct 2003
Posts
192
Location
Nottingham, UK
Hi,

I'm trying to figure out what's going on with my mate's PC. He says that it regularly crashes and makes a 'horrible sound'. From my testing I think this is the CPU overheat alarm from the BIOS. I ran Prime 95 on it and when running the 'blend; test it stops on the first iteration with a error. If I run it on 'Small FFTs', it seems to run for about 5 minutes before the PC crashes with the bios alarm.

Wierd thing is that MBM shows the CPU temps to have risen from 39 to about 48 when it crashes which doesn't seem that high to me. Just in case I cleaned the thermal compound from the CPU and reseated the HSF and ran it again. This bought the idle temps down a bit but it still crashed at about the same temp. There is no CPU temperature limit set in the bios.

Can anyone suggest what the problem might be? I'm wondering if the CPU might be dying since it has been running fine for 3 years up until this. Or could it be a power issue? The PSU is just the one which came with the case so it's nothing special but then it's worked fine up until now

Spec is

AMD Athlon Barton 3200+
Abit NF7-S2 Mobo
2 x 256MB PC3200
NVidia FX5200

Cheers
 
Yeah tried Memtest86 and the Microsoft memory tester and they both report no errors
 
Try re seatintg the cooler with some fresh paste.

Could also try some other temp progs, like everest and core temp.

Whats the vcore set at?
 
vcore is just the default for the CPU - it isn't overclocked at all.

I've already removed the thermal compound and reseated the CPU which appeared to help a little but hasn't really fixed the problem.
 
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