Re: A PC question.
- From: "R.Smith" <R.Smith@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Tue, 13 May 2008 15:29:31 +0100
"Dave Plowman (News)" <dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote in message
news:4f9ed68c21dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
This is something that seems to have defeated the best minds in the
UK so
I thought I'd try here...;-)
I have a home assembled PC - about 18 months old - using an Asus
A8N5X MB
and an Athlon 64 3000+ CPU. It's mainly used for semi-pro AV work.
After a year or so of faultless service, it started shutting down at
random. Would usually boot up again ok and carry on. After a few
occasions
I took to having PCProbe loaded and noticed the CPU temp would shoot
up
just before it shut down. So naturally removed the heatsink/fan,
cleaned
and replaced with new thermal transfer compound.
All was well for a month or so, then the fault started happening
earlier
and earlier - sometimes before XP had loaded. The bios power
management
page again showed the CPU overheating - going from ambient to
overheat in
around a minute. But the heatsink was cool to the touch. ;-)
I was intending to use the shotgun approach and simply replace the
MB -
and possibly CPU - but it seems this design of MB is now obsolete so
I'd
have to change lots of other things too.
I've not been able to find any description of how the CPU temp
sensing
works let alone any clues on fixing what must be an intermittent
fault -
as I've stripped and re-assembled the entire computer, cleaned all
connectors etc, and it's fine again once more. But for how long?...
Any informed guesses?
--
Dave Plowman dave@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx London SW
To e-mail, change noise into sound.
I wonder if you have one of those LSI do-it-all ball grid array
surface mount chips on your mobo? They have circuitry for controlling
fans etc. I have had a good number of them in laptops that give wierd
faults such as yours. It seems that sometimes the soldering of these
is not quite as good as it should be and I have repaired a few by the
judicious use of a heat gun together with a temperature probe. (Not
recommended unless you are faced with a choice of dumping it or having
a go at fixing it) You may be able to check if that is the problem by
using freezer spray.
I have seen reports of some gaming machine or other that suffers from
poor soldering of the BGA chips - there is even a video of someone
reflowing the solder using half a cat-food tin containing ingnited
alcohol stood on the offending chip on youtube or somewhere.
(Definitely NOT recommended, although it seemed to work!!).
Anyway, thats my contribution for what its worth.
.
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