3.0c issue resolved: What happened?

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particle9

Weaksauce
Joined
Jun 30, 2004
Messages
103
Hi,
Okay well this is the situation. I just built a new system, my first. I was having lots and lots of crashes in all 3d games and sometimes with WMP10. Because the large majority of crashes happened in games I blamed the new 6800GT. Everything, however, tested fine! The memory passed all tests, the card could run forever without artifacts on non-cpu intensive benchs. I never thought to question the cpu however because the temps were 38-42 idle 48-54 load. Now these are a little hot but people kept telling me not to worry about anything under 60c. So when I got my new graphic card I still got the same freezing. Well I decided on a whim to take off the heatsink and reapply AS5 and reseat (actually not on a whim I ran CPU burn and noticed the chip throttle down when it hit 54c). That fixed all my problems.

Now the question is, what the heck happend? Why was the chip throttling down? Why was it booting fine/loading everything fine/running hours of cpuburn fine/ and then all of a sudden freezing up? Also all my errors were memory errors (could not be read yadda yadda). This was the strangest thing to me, anywho, if anyone has any experience or expertise that knows what was going on that could enlighten me I'd appreciate it.
Thanks.
 
did you apply the AS5 word for word as instructed or did you overapply? Did you mount the hsf correctly making full contact with the heatspreader of the cpu the first time?
 
The heatsink was put on right, but maybe I did use too much AS5. The real question though is why did everything work for as long as it did at the temps that it did when things were goofy? That is what perplexes me.
I think that undoubtably I erred on the AS5 treaments or heatsink installation, but holy geez man! The only reason I even thought to reapply AS5 was that one time out of many many cpuburn tests I happened to notice the temps drop into the 20's from the 50's for thirty seconds.
 
Tell me about it :p

It all really makes sense now too. I could play CoD for almost 30 minutes or so fine, but if too much happened on the screen it would lock. But that game isn't so CPU intensive. I would run Sims2 and it would totally bork my computer after five minutes. I would run Doom3 for hours fine because the CPU doesn't do much at all in that game. Then I would fireup CS:Source and holy bork! Total lockup. Rome Total War? Forget about it! Just really bizarre. And I would get error messages that would all point to memory or drivers ie, nv4_disp.dll borked, memory could not be read, irq not less or equal. The problems never stopped! And then once I got my WMP10 library up to a few thousand songs it would flip out. Or if it tried to preview a divx/xvid WOW it would totally lock up. Now it all makes sense, the cpu was going nutty trying to keep up. But CPUBURN didn't return one error! It would run for hours generating insane heat with no problem, then I would try the Sims2 and the entire system would die. I could overclock the processor to 3.5ghz and it would boot fine and run CPUBURN fine. I must have done five reformats and tried every driver and test imaginable. Sometimes my PcProbe would alert me that the CPU fan wasn't working but by the time (2 seconds) it would take me to look at it it was always still going and the pcprobe would pick back up. Now that is scary! Nice little green line on a graph and then nothing for a few seconds then right back where it was lol.

Last night I played Rome Total War for nine hours straight. The Sims2 went through seven days ingame without a freeze or a stutter. Now the only thing that occasionally locks up is CS:Source, but I am currently shrugging this off as a programming glitch in a super cool brand spankin new game.

Anywho... long rant over I still can't figure out why this happened. Maybe too much AS5 can do some crazy reverse heat thing where it works fine and then for a second or two it starts insulating, who knows. I can't tell you how much it rocks to have a stable PC once again, lol.
 
Apply AS5 with the instructions on the arctic silver webpage.
That gives you the best results.
 
Yeah, these things get damn hot. I've had this 3.0GHz E for about 3 months now, and he's always around 40-60C with my thermaltake volcano 7+

..did I just call my cpu a he? :p
 
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