I recently purchased a new PC for my daughter. It consisted of a Gigabyte motherboard and Intel 3 gHZ 478 pin chip. The option to sound a warning if the chip gets to 60 deg C is turned on. When using the PC for DVD burning or using intensive games warning consistently sounds and chipset indicates CPU is overheating.

PC has been back to distributor three times and CPU and CPU fan and motherboard replaced, but problem still exists.

Has anyone experienced this problem and does anyone have a possible solution problem is driving us nuts.

regards Bob

Re: Overheating Gigabyte motherbaord

The problem and the solution are immediately obvious.

The problem is that you've got the over-temperature alarm turned on.

The solution is to turn it off.

The reason everyone else with a 3 Ghz socket 478 CPU isn't getting the alarm going off when they run CPU-intensive stuff is that they don't have the alarm set at 60C and turned on.

I suppose you could replace the standard heat sink with something better, but no-one does that. They just turn the alarm off, or set it to a higher temperature if they can. CPUs are capable of running quite happily at temperatures a lot higher than 60C. I hope. No, seriously, they are. And, anyway, you expected to have to replace it in a couple of years with a newer faster one, so you don't mind if it only last that long, right? And that'll be another couple of hundred bucks Intel gets off you for the CPU in it, so Intel doesn't think its a problem that CPUs only last a couple of years these days before they fail because they run so hot.

Re: Overheating Gigabyte motherbaord

Thanks for your comment Gordon.

It is interesting that the Intel website suggests that the temp for this particular chip should not exceed 60deg or it might cause damage!!

I think that I agree with you concerning this chipset, because the "older" chipset in my son's machine (2.8gig chip) which also has a Gigabyte board does not exhibit overheating tendencies and he plays "Doom" and other intensive games regularly over the net which taxes the chip.

I think I might try your suggestion and try and get a better CPU cooler which might help to overcome the heating issue, the big problem is that my daughter is in Bathurst doing her Uni degree and she needs to have a reliable machine, she cannot afford for it to die mid term and it does get hot up there at times which is why we were cocerned.

Thanks again for your comments.

Regards Rob

Re: Overheating Gigabyte motherbaord

Have you checked to ensure that your power supply exhaust fan is working? If its not sucking the hot air out of the case the CPU will run hot.

On a lot of cases you can install an extra fan to either suck cool air in at the front, or blow more hot air out at the rear. Either, or both, drops air temperature a couple of degrees.

You can tell if its an air flow-through issue by taking the cover off the case and seeing if it makes much difference in termperature.

If it doesn't then either the CPU is producing too much heat for the power of the heat sink fitted to it, or they aren't thermally bonded together well enough. Heat sinks are rated in degrees/watt. A heat sink with a 0.5 degree per watt rating is actually a reasonably good heat sink. That means a CPU that's drawing 70 watts will be running at 35C above ambient.

I looked up the Intel website. But there are lots of different 3.0 GHz socket 478 P4s. I couldn't tell which yours was. The section of the intel web site I read gave a thermal spec. That's the temperature the CPU is rated to properly operate continually at and not be damaged by operating at, minus a few degrees as a safety margin. The lowest rated of the 3.0 GHz S478 processors was 66C, and the rest were all 69C or 70C. I couldn't imagine Intel selling a CPU that would fail or be demaged at only 60C.

That said the hotter it runs the sooner it fails. So cooler is better.

My CPU isn't an Intel. Its an AMD. AMD is less conservative with its temperature ratings and doesn't allow the safety margin Intel does. It rates all its processors in the 75-95C range. Laptop processors are usually rated higher because the cooling in them is usually poor. Mine is rated for a maximum die temperature of 85C and runs at over 60C all the time. Even when its not under any unusual load. That has me a little concerned at about what it must be when it is under load on a hot day.

Re: Overheating Gigabyte motherbaord

Thanks for your comments Gordon,

Yes I did check the fans and had an additional fan fitted to the box to try and force additional cooling air through which it did seem to do. I removed any dusk within the box and fan and around all air flow holes. The only other possibility is that the mother board temp is not measuring correctly. We even increased the temp range to 70 to 80 degrees but I was concerned that this was getting too hot and dropped it back to the 60 degree warning temp. NB it still went up beyond 70 degress just idling in BIOS mode without running any software before fitting the extra fan and a replacement heat sink but of the same intel variety as the original.

I started to suspect that it may have been some software interferring with the temp measurement but discounted this as any software running was causing the CPU to get hot anyway.

I will speak to the dealer and see if we can get a better heatsink fan fitted, as you suggested. If that does not work then I am sure that someone out there needs a boat anchor. My only other solution is to turn the warning off and if CPU blows to replace it with another ( but I would not really be happy with this solution)

In the world of today you would think that machines would work correctly the first time around.

regards Rob

Re: Overheating Gigabyte motherbaord

Something else to consider.......

My Intel machine recently shut itself down due to an overheat (CPU alarm was turned off), when it finally would restart after a cooldown period the CPU was at 88 degrees, don't know what it actually peaked at! Reason for the overheat was that the CPU heatsink cooling fins immediately under the fan were full of compacted dust. Cleaned this out and CPU rarely goes above 50 now.

Re: Overheating Gigabyte motherbaord

Just to make sure... the motherboard alarm is set in Degrees not Farenheit right? Just thought id check.

Gordon: Your AMD runs at 60+ all the time? M/ Athlon 64 3500+ runs at 29 degrees idle and at 31 degrees during gaming. Must be new architechure. hmmm.

Re: Overheating Gigabyte motherbaord

Joel

I've got an identical pair of PCs both fitted the fastest of the Athlon XPs. The Athlon XP 3200+. That model runs a higher core voltage and a faster clock than any other they built. It was the fastest AMD dared push the old 130 nm Athlon XP chip architecture. And the temperature it runs at shows why they discontinued it and only kept the slower models when they rebranded the Athlon XPs as Semprons and switched over to the cooler-running 90 nm Athlon 64s for their performance models.

One of the pair runs at 54C. The other one goes straight up 61C as soon as it is turned on. I may have either used too little or too much thermal compound on it. But, hey, what the heck, its rated for up to 85C, I have a spare, and frying them would be a good excuse to go buy an Athlon 64.