athon64 heat issue (1 Viewer)

A

Anonymous

Guest
Hello all... normally I would go to a specialist forum on processors and motherboards for this, but since there's an abundance of smart people here I thought I might check first. I bought a boxed 3ghz Athlon64 with AMD approved heatsink and fan. No problems for two weeks until yesterday.

Case is running at 34 deg C. when just hanging out in the BIOS and monitoring socket temp, it's at about 51 deg C., but after WinXP boots, SmartGuardian and MBM report socket temperature up to 70 or 71 deg C, even with CPU usage at <20%.

i tried, uh, "manually verifying" the temp by just touching the heatsink, which felt quite normal and room temperature to touch.

the airflow situation is good: side intake fan, rear outtake and chassis fan. cables are nice and secured to avoid blocking flow.

can anyone imagine any cabling issues or MB malfunctions that might cause this? any known issues with AMD fan/heatsinks? oh... and i am NOT trying any overclocking or such.

thanks!
 

htpcman

Portal Member
September 12, 2004
35
0
Frankfurt, Germany
Hi,

If the heatsink is feeling cold this could mean that there is no good thermal contact between the CPU and the heatsink. AFAIK the Athlon has a meauring diode on the cpu die which means the temperature reported is the actual temperature on the silicon of the cpu. Now if there is not enough heat conduction from the cpu to the heatsink the heat can not be dissipated. I would remove the heatsink and check that it has good physical contact to the cpu with heat coducting paste (the gooey white stuff that should be on the cpu and heatsink sufaces touchning each other).

Before re-installing the cpu make sure to clean both the top of the cpu and the heat sink with alcohol or aceton then apply a small amount of heat coducting paste and spread it evenly in a very thin layer on the cpu's metal top. Then re-install the heatsink and check temp.

good luck

htpcman
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
htpcman: thanks for the info. i managed to track down the problem to some sort of issue between my mobo (dfi lanparty nf3) and MBM5. which is too bad because it would be nice to have that info in the My Status page. oh well!

i did redo the thermal paste just to be doubly sure though... thanks again for the assistance!
 

tklon

Portal Pro
September 3, 2004
353
6
Germany
Home Country
Germany Germany
With my Soltek board programs like mbm and everest home edition don't show the correct temps. I only trust the temps reported by the Soltek Hardware Monitor Utility. You should try to use the program of your mainboard manufacturer if there is such a program available.

I believe when the temp in BIOS is at 51° C there is no problem with your headsink, so the temps displayed under windows are not correct.

Which MB is in your system?
 
A

Anonymous

Guest
it's a DFI Lanparty NF3 250gb ... their utility is functional and reports correctly but it is UUUUUGGGLY. and even if you uncheck 'start with windows' it still does. it's really annoying. but again, the only reason for using mbm5 was integration with MP.

once mbm5 was taken out of the picture i now get CPU temp averaging around 48C both in bios and windows. which is certainly fine in terms of AMD's specified limits.

the craziest thing about mbm5 is like it was feeding information back into the sensors... if i set up the bios to shutdown after a high temp, it would do that right after mbm5 started.
 

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