System crashing...

[Armitage]

I'll be up for awhile, and then suddenly I get this kind of alternating two tone buzzing sound from the box and it shuts down. Doesn't seem to correlate to anything I'm doing at the time. Sometimes the desktop hangs before it goes down, but not always.

I was thinking power supply, so I just put in a new 400W unit. I put in a new video card at the same time (NVidia 6600) but it's still happening.

All the fans (cpu, gpu, 2x case) are spinning. Can't get the sensors working at the moment, but nothing feels hot.

Motherboard: GA-7VT600 1394
CPU: retail boxed Athlon XP2600, running stock

2x hard drives, 2x CD/DVD drives, NIC card, 1.5GB RAM That's about it. OS is Fedora Core 5

The extra 1GB ram was added recently as well, but removing it doesn't solve the problem.

Any ideas?

 

[Brainonska511]

Do you have the latest BIOS installed?

 

[Armitage]

Originally posted by: Brainonska511
Do you have the latest BIOS installed?

Probably not.

I took out a DLink gigabit NIC that I put in awhile ago, and it's been up for a few hours now, but there's a kernel oops in the log files.

I'm updating every right now - which includes a new kernel version, probably a new nvidia driver and I'll check for a bios update as well.

 

[Armitage]

What's a sane CPU temp? I just went into the bios health & status immedietely after a crash and found the CPU temp at about 71 C

Sounds kind of high, but I'm not an overclocker so I don't know off hand.

 

[Brainonska511]

Originally posted by: Armitage
What's a sane CPU temp? I just went into the bios health & status immedietely after a crash and found the CPU temp at about 71 C

Sounds kind of high, but I'm not an overclocker so I don't know off hand.

A quick search led me to the AMD forum where someone was complaining that their XP 2600 Barton was 51C idle. So I would guess that 71 is just a little too high.
Have you checked your heatsink? Make sure it is secure in the socket, maybe pull it off, clean off the thermal paste and apply a new coat.

 

[Armitage]

I'm really becoming conviced that its a thermal issue. It was up for a few hours - but was idle. When I started working with it it crashed - specifically while running the update. On reboor it crashed again pretty quickly. I've now flipped the switch to run the bus at 100MHz, and it's gotten much further in the update process. Dog slow though.

Unfortunately I don't have any thermal paste - or at least I can't find it. So I'm not puling the heatsink off tonight.

 

[jagilbertvt]

a 2-tone sound is usually caused by a thermal event. There is usually an option in the bios to set the temp at which to sound an alarm (by default i think this is in 70c-80c range). 71c idle is defintiely to hot. Assuming you haven't already, you can try cleaning the heatsink w/ some compressed air. Reseating the heatsink may be the best option. Also, make sure the cpu fan is working.

 

[Armitage]

Originally posted by: jagilbertvt
a 2-tone sound is usually caused by a thermal event. There is usually an option in the bios to set the temp at which to sound an alarm (by default i think this is in 70c-80c range). 71c idle is defintiely to hot. Assuming you haven't already, you can try cleaning the heatsink w/ some compressed air. Reseating the heatsink may be the best option. Also, make sure the cpu fan is working.

CPU fan is definitely working - bios said about 2800 RPM. I'll re-seat it tomorrow and see if that helps. Strange that its been working fine for about two years - I've never touched anything with the heatsink or cpu since I put it together originally. Maybe I bumped it when I put the new RAM or DVD burner in???

 

[Brainonska511]

Originally posted by: Armitage

Originally posted by: jagilbertvt
a 2-tone sound is usually caused by a thermal event. There is usually an option in the bios to set the temp at which to sound an alarm (by default i think this is in 70c-80c range). 71c idle is defintiely to hot. Assuming you haven't already, you can try cleaning the heatsink w/ some compressed air. Reseating the heatsink may be the best option. Also, make sure the cpu fan is working.

CPU fan is definitely working - bios said about 2800 RPM. I'll re-seat it tomorrow and see if that helps. Strange that its been working fine for about two years - I've never touched anything with the heatsink or cpu since I put it together originally. Maybe I bumped it when I put the new RAM or DVD burner in???

That's always a possibility.

 

[rasczak]

also if your heatsink is covered with dust, take some compressed air and dust off the bunnies.

 

[anjulpa]

2800 RPM is not great at your temperatures... cleaning your heatsink might help.

 

[CoachB]

I would bet your heatsink fan is on the way out. As stated above 71C is way too hot and 2800 RPM sounds slow to me.
If it's not the heatsink/fan, try running diagnostics on your harddrive/s.

CoachB

 

[Armitage]

Well, I picked up a new fan & some thermal compound over lunch. That and a blast from the air compressor and we'll see where things stand.

 

[Armitage]

I'm an idiot :|

The heat sink was on backwards - only about half the thermal pad was in contact with the CPU - the other half likely had an air gap. So cleaned that off & put on some new grease, blew it out and put it back on correctly. The dust buildup was apparently slowing down the fan as well - it's now turning at 3500 rpm, and the cpu temp is about 45C Everything appears to be stable so far.

I'm lucky the thing didn't cook itself a long time ago.

 

[anjulpa]

I really need to know this. Would it really have fried? I mean it would shutdown itself right? What are the chances you ended up with a burnt processor?

 

[Armitage]

Originally posted by: anjulpa
I really need to know this. Would it really have fried? I mean it would shutdown itself right? What are the chances you ended up with a burnt processor?

It will only shut itself down if you have thermal protection turned on in the bios (which I did) and the system has time to react. If you have no heatsink on, it's likely that the cpu will overheat so fast that the bios can't catch it.

My heatsink was only in partial contact with the die - but it was enough to cool it for awhile - until the dust built up, and the fan slowed down, and the weather warmed up. And it still overheated slowly enough yo catch it.

I might have still done some damage though - I woke up to another kernel oops this morning

edit I should also add that this is not true for Intel CPUs which have had thermal protection built into the CPU for some time now. This can react much faster. Do wthe 64 bit AMD cpus have this yet?