I built a new PC for my church's youth group about one year ago, with the following spec's:
Asus A7N8X (non-deluxe) MB
2 X 512MB Crucial PC 2700 ram
AMD Xp 2400 cpu
no-name Nvidia MX 440 64MB video card (donated, not my choice)
80 GB Western Digital HD w/ 8 MB cache
Thermaltake Volcano 9 HSF
Artic Silver Ceramique paste, lightly applied
Lite-On 16 X DVD
Lite-On 52X32X52 CD rewriter
Sony floppy
one extra 80 mm case fan exhausting at the upper rear
Enlight 360w PS (replace burned out generic 300w about 3 months ago)
Windows XP Pro, fresh install
System is never connected to the web and is only used by one semi-knowlegable adult.
He brought me the system yesterday complaining of random system shutdowns after short (15-30 minutes) periods of light use. I fired it up in my shop and the Asus PC Probe monitoring software reported MB temp's around 85-88 F and cpu temp's around 102-105 F, perfectly normal. I ran Norton Speeddisk to stress it and it shut down with a loud "click" after a couple of minutes. Test repeated several times with same result.
I rebooted into bios and the Asus C.O.P. (CPU Overheating Protection) built into the board was reporting MB temp's of 135-140 F and cpu temp's of 175-179 F at idle. I cranked up the cpu fan to 5000+ rpm from the 3000+ rpm it had been running for the past year and C.O.P. temp's dropped to 120-125 F and 170-175 F, some 50-70+ degees higher than the Asus Probe had reported. Booting into Windows, the Probe indicated MB temp's of 80-85 F and cpu temp's around 95-98 F.
i played around with it for about an hour without incident, but it shut down with the familiar "click" when I ran a manual virus scan with Norton AV.
It appears that the C.O.P. is reporting dramatically higher temp's than the Probe and shutitng down the system to protect against overheating. However the case is open with ambient temp of 73 F and the HS is cool to the touch.
A visit to the Asus website and a Google search have produced no answers yet.
Bad motherboard?
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