I have an AMD Athlon XP @ 1.67 GHz in a Polywell tower box. Surprisingly, it has a fan on the CPU and two more on other chips, plus the power supply fan and another muffin
fan on the side panel. That should be enough to keep things cool, eh?
After about a year, suddenly got a really loud beep-booping (like a European siren) which just kept going until I shut it down. Assuming it was a heat warning (the tech support guys listened to it on the phone and said they had no idea what it was!), shut down, opened the case and vacuumed and cleaned up everything.
That took care of it, so cleaned it every three months or so just to be sure.
Now, it started about two weeks after the last cleaning, so did it again, but shortly after turning it on, it did it again. I went into the CMOS and checked the operating temperatures, and it showed the System temp at 122 F and the CPU at 149 F.
I Googled and found for this chip, that is well below the recommended temp of 85C (185F). So, just decided to turn off the warning signals in the CMOS and will check
it every now and them to be sure it is not getting too hot.
Is this a dangerous practice? Any suggestions as to what else can do about this?
Klondike
Buy a bigger heat sink and a new fan?
IANAComputer Tech, but why are you assuming it is a heat warning? I would check the motherboard manufacturer’s website for information on your particular MoBoard’s different warning beeps. Sounds like it isn’t the CPU heat that is triggering it. If it isn’t the heat issue, it’s prolly something else.
I wouldn’t worry about it, one of mine has been doing that for a couple of years with no ill effects but only with Windows, Linux shuts it down normally.
That’s interesting. Been using computers for 20 years and never encountered this before, but good to know am not alone. I might have known it was something peculiar to Windoze!
I wish I had the patience to switch over to Linux, but don’t for the same reason don’t go to the Mac: just too many old programs and files am familiar with to be worth switching.
Also appreciate the suggestion to scope out the motherboard website, which will do…
If I did my math right, 149 deg F is about 65 deg C. You really want the temp to be less than 45 deg C. 50 is pushing it, 65 is too hot.
85 deg C is the temp at which the chip is going to die very, very soon. That doesn’t mean that it’s safe to run the chip at say 80 deg C, though. A quick and dirty rule of thumb is that every 10 deg C above room temp cuts the expected life of the CPU in half, though this rule is notoriously inaccurate at either end of the scale (the bad effects don’t really start kicking in until about 45 deg C, and towards 80 deg C the CPU is going to die a lot earlier than this rule will predict).
Most people upgrade their computers after a few years, so many computer manufacturers will run their CPUs above 45 deg C just to save a bit on the cost of cooling fans and such. It’s not all that uncommon for a CPU to run at 50 or 55 deg C, and they figure you’ll upgrade long before the reliability issues come into play. This is especially true for laptops, which almost always run way too hot. It’s normal for a CPU heat alarm to be set for 60 deg C.
Check to make sure the CPU cooling fan is spinning properly. I had one once that would spin sometimes, and sometimes not, and if you touched it or jiggled the computer it would take off immediately. The first couple of times I checked it, it happened to be running, so it took a while to figure it out. Another potential problem is that when you were in there vacuuming, maybe you bumped the fan, and now perhaps the heat sink isn’t sitting properly on the chip. If there is a tiny gap, the heat sink won’t work properly and the chip will heat up. If all else fails, put a new cooling fan and heat sink on it.