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hydrive1902

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PC Overheating- or bad heat sensor in this PC?

Hi, I am working on a PC (dell inspiron 530s) and the problem was that it would often boot up saying windows was not found. Turns out the hard drive was the problem it had a major overheating issue (shown in the pic below).

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I installed a new hard drive and everything seems to run ok, but check out my speedfan results for "temp. 1". Something appears to be very hot, but the hard drive temp appears to be fine.

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I turn the system on (so the system is cold still) and check it and it immediately says its around 180, and then I run the system for an hour and check it again and it still says 180 (183 tops). Could this just be a bad sensor (maybe due to the original overheating)?
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dbrunton
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rrjmino- that was actually the very first thing I checked (the capacitates) I thought that was going to be the issue, not the hard drive but after checking them all and having them pass a visual check I decided to pop the hard drive out and that’s when I saw it had overheated.

dbrunton- when I took the machine home with me I did that (air dusted it out, and changed the thermal compound) since the machine is about 3 or 4 years old.  Didn’t find nearly as much dust as I expected, the customer keeps the computer on a computer stand so I guess that helps a lot because I expected to see a lot more dust then what I found.




From reading the other posts I got another idea- I am going to leave the side open and shoot the board with a laser thermometer and see if I can pick anything up with that.



Callandor-  what do you mean the bios readings? Do you mean like in the startup, doing the tests the bios has?
Retail motherboards usually have temperature monitoring in BIOS setup (often called system health). OEM PCs such as Dell and HP do not have temperature info in BIOS setup in my experience.
One other thing. Heatsinks may not be hot when chip is overheating if poor contact and/or deteriorated thermal compound is the cause of overheating.
What were the results from running SIW?

I've added an extract from a SpeedFan FAQ that may be of interest.

To find your CPU's temperature sensor you can leave your system idle for a few minutes, to let temperatures drop, and then go to 100% usage for a while. The temperature that rises faster is the one you're searching for. Other available temperature readings usually come from your sensor chip itself, from the southbridge, the voltage regulator, or even from an additional probe placed under the processor. This additional temperature sensor is not necessarily a duplicate. Some CPUs are not actually able to report the internal temperature from their die. To be able to read their temperatures, an additional external sensor (thermocouple) is used. In such cases, you will see two temperatures referring to the processor. The higher of the two is from the die. As a final note, please remember that not all available temperature sensors are actually connected to something. If you happen to read unusually high or low temps, they are likely to be from a disconnected (unused) temperature sensor.

http://www.almico.com/sffaq.php

Also check the Fans:
With the Fan Power leads disconnected, if the Fans spin freely when you give them a spin they are probably OK. If there is resistance replace them.
Thanks for the replies. I didnt see anything suspicious in SIW but I did scan the entire board with the lazer thermometer and the highest temp I got with the side open was 80 F. Since that was the highest temp I found I assume that sensor is bad or not hooked up. Thanks everyone.
If the temperature isn't rising and your system isn't shutting down to prevent damage, you should be good to go.