The User Strikes Back

[microchip.livejournal.com]

A friend of mine built his new computer yesterday. Athlon64 system. He's not the most technical of people, but I thought "heh, it's only building a computer, and he's got someone fairly technical next door. He shouldn't have much in the way of problems". Hmmm!

All was going well and good, but for the fact it was turning itself off, generally within around 10 minutes. He rang me up several times, I gave him basic diagnostics, he got nowhere. I went over to check it out. Tested the power supply in another PC, worked fine. Concluded it was something to do with the motherboard, either software or hardware wise. Had a thought, and asked him "Did you take the plastic off the bottom, peeling off from the heatsink paste?" "Er, dunno" came the reply.

Hopped into the BIOS, and checked the temperature. Watched it tick up. 32. 34. 36. Right up to around 68 when it cut out. Decided the processor obviously wasn't getting cooled, so I unclipped the CPU heatsink and fan. Lifted it up, and sure enough, the heatsink paste was all intact. Underneath the huge plastic cover, which covered the whole of the bottom of the heatsink. Which was beginning to melt. Somehow, he'd had managed to leave the original plastic cover on the bottom of the fan/heatsink underneath the heatsink itself, locking it in between the heatsink and processor. So the CPU was in direct contact with... plastic. Which had begun to get deformed and start to melt. Oops. This wouldn't have been anywhere near as bad, if it hadn't been blatantly obvious, at least 1cm deep on the bottom of the heatsink, and the fact the silicon heatsink paste was underneath it, very well protected from any actual heat.

Suffice to say that it cheered me up no end that evening, and everyone who heard pointed and laughed. Including me. Repeatedly.

Funnily enough, after removal of the plastic, it ran at a nice cool 25^oC. Shiny.

(X-Posted.)

Comments

[coyoteden.livejournal.com]

I built an Athlon 64 system that screamed an overheat warning the instant it was turned on. Checked the BIOS temps and it was hovering right around 99 deg C... immediately, with a heat spreader and AMD stock HSF. Yeah right. Still, I drove myself nuts wondering what was wrong with the way I put the heatsink on.

Oddly enough, it seemed to run fine if I ignored the racket. At least, it ran long enough to take a BIOS flash, at which point the CPU temps became sane.

This was an Abit board too, I didn't think these kind of stupid problems.

Abit boards.

[coyoteden.livejournal.com]

... what I meant to say was I didn't think they had these kind of stupid problems. My AN7 sure didn't.

[microchip.livejournal.com]

Yeah, this was on a Gigabyte. Definately was at the temperature reported though - that plastic was mighty toasty!

[axessdenyd.livejournal.com]

I hjad someone come ni with a similar problem on some kind of Socket A system.

Turns out that he'd managed to install the heatsink backward, so it was propped up on that little shelf, and wasn't even touching the CPU.

[jecook]

I had a friend do that with his system. Can't remember what he was running at the time...

I'm glad to hear that the athlon64s have overheat protection. the older models would just cookthemselves if you did not have the HSF on correctly.

[microchip.livejournal.com]

I think it was the motherboard that shut it down rather than the processor. The processor seemed quite happy at 96^oC, although it was glitching a little.

[axessdenyd.livejournal.com]

Yeah, Tom's Hardware had the best video of that.

Wow, my typing in that last reply was...unimpressive.

[compwizrd.livejournal.com]

i had a socket 370 celeron 667 at work that had the heatsink fall off from a broken socket. the system continued to run, but temperatures were well over the boiling point of water.. i have no idea why it didn't die, it probably helped that it was a linux fileserver, and not running windows.

[mindy.livejournal.com]

When I bought my first system in parts, I didn't even know you needed a heatsink. My experience up to that point had all been with 386s and 486s, which don't (at least for cheap commodity hardware!). I managed to fry an AthlonXP 2600+, which was really expensive back then. My room smelled awful for weeks.