Help, MSI K7 Master and 1.33 run at 90 degrees C!

[dwn]

Do you think I have a bad board or something? I don't know what to do. I have the board, the chip, a MSI geforce2 pro, SB Live! Plat, 512MD DDR RAM, 40GB Maxtor drive with the ATA controller card or whatever that is called when you plug it into the PCI Slot. And first off, I notice that when I go to the temperature check in the setup window (by pressing Del) the CPU chip is a bit high at like 90 degrees C! I have an Alpha, and I *think* I installed it correctly with arctic silver and all. I pulled the 4 little round pads off of the CPU, very lightly coated the center core rectangle chip thing, and placed the heatsink on. Oh, and I have a Enermax 430 watt power supply.

Here's the other problem. When I first installed win98, everything was running fine, then I stuck in another PCI card (an old audio card I use for music recording), went to boot up, but it just hung after the windows boot screen, just never quite made it to the desktop. So I pulled the card back out, but the problem never went away. It would continue to hang before it reached the desktop even without the old audio card. That's when I went for the reformat, and reinstall of everything. Of course, I just then realized that my temp was off the chart!

I could really use some advice here. I got the board from newegg.com, are they good about returns if the board turns out to be defective or something? Should I try to exchange for the ASUS one? This sucks!

What do you guys think I should do or try.

 

[hokahknow]

90c is way to high for an Athlon. I would reinstall the heatsink and make sure you are getting good contact. Be careful not to crush the core of the CPU.:frown:

 

[dwn]

So do you think I should put those 4 little round pads back on the CPU to avoid crushing it?

 

[NesuD]

you shouldn't have pulled the pads off the cpu those are there to make sure that the base of the heatsink is sitting square on the top of the die. If you have the alpha that has its own pads you should have removed those as they are for intel flip chips. either the heatsink is not sitting tightly on the die or it may be tilting slightly causing a poor contact with the die. if your alpha doesn't have its own pads try putting the pands back on the cpu but make sure thay are sitting flat as they are made to be the exact height to allow good cpu contact.

 

[dwn]

OK, thanks for the advise, I really do appreciate it. It ran hot before I pulled the pads off, although I'm not sure if it was *that* hot.

How hot is too hot for this board/chip?