cooling problem

[lozina]

I seem to be having a cooling problem on my Athlon 1800 XP system...

Yesterday while the outside temps were reaching 80's my BIOS temperature warning kicked in with it's annoying beeping. I have set that warning at 60, which I think is lower than default but all through last summer it has not triggered a warning. The room housing the computer was not particular hot either, little cooler than outside. I took off the side panel and it cooled down a bit...

All the fans are in order, and there is some slight dust buildup which I'll blow away with low pressure compressed air but I don't think that will help any. One thing I am starting to suspect is the contact between the heatsink and my cpu... it was the first time I mounted a heatsink and I think back at the time I may not have applied enough of the thermal compound, but I keep thinking if I ddn't apply enough I'd have much worse problems right?

It's always been a hassle keeping my PC cool in my room though, because it's under a desk in a rather confined environment (although not enclosed in a cabinet or anyhting like that). Should I start looking into water cooling perhaps?

 

[Pseudodominion]

what core is the 1800+(palomino,tbred-AorB)? What is the heatsink you used and what thermal compound? 60* is getting rather toasty. It wouldn't hurt to take the heatsink of clean it and the core off and reapply some Arctic Silver to it following their guide to applying it and see if the temps persist.

 

[lozina]

It is a TBird core, and the heatsink is an alpha PAL8045. Used the thermal paste that came with the heatsink- now I can't remember what it was called...

 

[Pseudodominion]

Well T-Birds weren't Athlon XP's. So are you sure its a T-Bird or do you mean Tbred? T-Birds were only Athlon and only made it to 1440Mhz, so I think you mean Tbred which stands for thoroughbred. If thats the case it is running a bit warm. I never use the paste or pads that come with heatsinks. I only use Arctic Silver. I would take the heatsink off and clean it really good with denatured alcohol, and the core of the cpu as well. Then apply a thin layer of AS to the core of the CPU and reattach the HSF. in addition if there is quite a bit of oxidation on the copper core, you may want to give it a good lapping. The following URL has an excellent article on doing it.

http://www.bigbruin.com/html/lapping-guide.htm

I used it this guide to lap my waterblock and in my pictures at the next URL, you can see a big difference between the MFG 600 grit finish to my 2000grit finish.

http://s92438186.onlinehome.us/gallery/Maze-Lapping

 

[Cheetah8799]

A PAL8045 should definately cool a t-bird just fine. Are you sure you have it mounted firmly, and all 4 mounting screws are tight? 60C seems high, since I owned a PAL8045 and ran it on a XP2200+ in a low profile case. Granted, I had to mod the case a bit, but it still didn't get much over 50C I think. I haven't owned that setup for a while now...

 

[lozina]

yeah now I dont recall what kind of core it was then- I bought the parts for the system and put it together a couple years ago...

I will go out and buy some sandpaper tonight and take everything apart and lap it, as per demancalledbok's suggestion. oh but I first need to order arctic silver and wait for that to be delivered...

as for the screws being tight enough, again it's been too long to remember, but I do recall being very careful in fear of tightening too much and cracking the core, so that may also be a possibility