nVidia and Hardy and everything

[B.J. McClure]

On Sun, 2008-04-20 at 14:55 +0200, Nils Kassube wrote:
> Karl Larsen wrote:
> >     I now have the covers off the box and it is still cool here. Now I
> > can't make the system crash. It worked just great with Hardy. I have
> > just re-loaded the good nVidia driver for 7.10. I am sure now it will
> > be stable and look a lot better than the "nv" I am now using.
> 
> And that's a problem you probably can't overcome with your new mainboard 
> without Nvidia chips. Your open box reminds me of a similar problem I had 
> long ago, when I installed extra RAM and HD in a machine. It became too 
> hot as well. I solved it by reducing the processor clock about 10% - then 
> I could close the box again without crashes. I don't know if you can 
> change the clock on your mainboard, but if it is possible you could give 
> it a try.
> 
> 
> Nils

How about a logical troubleshooting procedure here guys.  Start with the
hardware monitor section of the bios.  Look at voltages first.  Are they
within 10% of nominal?  If so, look at ambient (mobo) and CPU temps.
With case open ambient should be only a couple degrees above room temp.
CPU 10 to 15 degrees above mobo and well below 70 deg C.  If that all
looks o.k. with case open, close it up, run anything CPU intensive and
make same checks after half an hour or so.  If everything is still cool,
boot into memtest, cover the box to increase temps to near max and let
it run over night.

If CPU temp is excessive on closed box test, shutdown, remove heatsink
and fan.  Clean heatsink fins with dry compressed air or nitrogen.  No
sparks please.  Clean any thermal tape or heatsink compound from
heatsink and CPU with acetone.  Do not breath fumes.  Reassemble with a
silver based thermal compound such as Arctic Silver.  Use a very thin
layer...just enough to cover the die portion of the CPU chip.  If it
squeezes out when you secure the heatsink you used too much.  Make sure
the heatsink is mounted with correct orientation!  Some can be installed
in such a way that good contact is not made with CPU die.

Verify that all fans are turning the correct direction.  I have seen
them plugged into motherboards incorrectly (I know, very hard to do) and
on one occasion a fan mis-wired so that it ran backwards.

Other readers of this "blog" may be interested in your findings.

B.J.

Ubuntu 7.10, Linux 2.6.22-14-generic unknown 09:27:51 up 2 days, 2:27, 1
user, load average: 0.00, 0.00, 0.00