arctic silver = +5degrees C ???

[DJFuji]

Got a problem here. Took off the old, worn thermal pad on my 1.2 Athlon -C (non DDR), and applied some arctic silver because i wasnt comfortable with the ~50C temps i was getting. I have a thermoengine + delta 7000 rpm fan, so i should be getting MUCH better temps than that. So i finish up, power the thing on, and it climbs to 55C! True, it DID say it would take at least 72 hours for a full effect, but i didnt expect temps to climb in the meantime. Is this normal?

Problem 2: the big problem right now is that the OS cant load pass the boot sequence. Right when i get to the "booting from CDROM" msg (in case i had a bootable CD in), it freezes on a blank screen. I've also gotten a garbled screen, and a BSOD about page fault in non paged area a few times. Bottom line is that it can't get past this part. It ONLY freezes up there, which makes me think its not really heat, esp since it was only +5 degrees. Tried booting from bootable XP CD too, and it freezes on initialization.

Also, i've booted it cold and tried to get past the boot sequence before it warmed up. It got the "starting windows xp" screen but then promptly rebooted. It did this twice, and when i looked at the temps afterward, they werent even past 45 degrees yet. Which means heat shouldnt have affected it. I am thoroughly confused. A friend said it might be the power supply, but i dont know why it would spontaneously blow up like that. From adding arctic silver? I've reseated all my hardware, and im about to redo the thermal compound procedure, because its just the only thing i can think of that might be still causing the problem, even though it doesnt make sense. Any ideas?

 

[Ape]

If this all happened after you added the paste. Do you think you might have chipped to CPU??? I had a Duron 800 that I had chipped slightly and never worked the same. Ape Out.

 

[Joker81]

did you put too much on? I heard you are only supposed to put on a paper thin amount. So thin you can almost see through it. Its only suppsed to help fill in the gaps between the CPU and Heatsink, Not be the only thing between them. Did you make sure you cleaned off the heatsink too. The pads sometimes leave gunk that may hinder the flow of heat. Check the fan too. Just my suggestions.

 

[DJFuji]

dont think i chipped it. If i had, i dont think it would even POST. Though i did use a razor to apply the AS and it could very well be a possibility.

fan's running fine, heatsink was cleaned and polished, and thermal compound was paper thin. I'm gonna take it apart and try again, though. nothing else seems to be working.

 

[Epimetreus]

I only use a razor for my Geforce 4 when applying paste.
I would NEVER use anything but a driver's license or credit card(preferably driver's license, it is stiffer and tends to have smoother edges) on a CPU since they are so tiny and delicate.

 

[WarCon]

Did you put the heatsink on backwards? Did it catch on the lip? Any paste should perform equally if not much better than almost any pad.

 

[DJFuji]

Must have done something wrong the first time. I took it apart, redid the whole procedure (using pure acetone this time to clean), and reapplied it with an even thinner layer (semi translucent), and temps have gone from 55C to 37C at medium load. Awesome.

Now the bad news. System is horribly unstable. Explorer seems to officially and unofficially crash or hang several times a day. By "official" i mean sometimes i get an error message. By unofficial, i mean a lot of times the task bar just seems to freeze while the rest of the system works. Sometimes the taskbar becomes black, other times it just displays a busy mouse icon. I try to ctrl-alt-del from there and while i can access all commands, the system seems to hang on the "saving data to disk" screen of the shut down process. The whole thing seems weird because i reseated all RAM, PCI cards, system temps are great now, and i didnt mess with anything. I even tried resetting BIOS to failsafe defaults, and still the same problem. I can't see it being a software issue, as the only thing that's changed is hardware. Any more ideas?

 

[EeyoreX]

memtest is my suggestion. RAM can go bad in a flash and could be a coincidence it died on ya at this time.

\Dan

 

[Jeff7]

Did you clean the heatsink with acetone when you initially took the thermal pad off? If not, that might have been the cause of the higher temps.

 

[jackschmittusa]

It is quite possible that when Windows was crashing before, it corrupted some files. You might try re-installing Windows with an over-the-top installation to replace any corrupted files.