Computer overheating or something else?

[imported_dvdman]

Just over the last week or so I have noticed my PC acting a bit strange where at time when I do random actions on the PC, such as right click in the browser or go to a file menu the screen display would go all whacky; sometimes even displaying portions of the screen as a solid black color & the other bits displaying the contents of other programs I have open in my task bar.

The strange thing is these issues only seem to occur when using a browser; I mainly use Firefox & sometimes Chrome and I have noticed it occur in both; but can't recall it happening in any other program.

Here is an example screenshot I took of one of the things it does..

As you can see, this happened when I right clicked the screen.

I rebooted & checked the temps..... CPU was @ 66 C & climbed up to 71 C whilst I was watching. Motherboard was stable @ 47 C.

My CPU is a: Intel Core 2 Duo 6750 2.66Ghz

Thanks a lot!

 

[strep3241]

I would say it is a problem with overheating. I think 66c is too high for just doing normal stuff. What kind of cpu cooler do you have? Did you build this yourself or is it a prebuilt? If you haven't done so already, I would blow out all the dust and maybe put new thermal paste on.

For me, my idle temps are mid 30's and load temps while playing BF3 are in the mid 40's with the cpu in my sig.

 

[imported_dvdman]

I would say it is a problem with overheating. I think 66c is too high for just doing normal stuff. What kind of cpu cooler do you have? Did you build this yourself or is it a prebuilt? If you haven't done so already, I would blow out all the dust and maybe put new thermal paste on.

For me, my idle temps are mid 30's and load temps while playing BF3 are in the mid 40's with the cpu in my sig.

It just uses the stock cooler. Was built by myself & is heavily due for an upgrade haha

I will check the fan & clean out the dust & apply some more paste as you suggested.

 

[sm625]

Yeah for an E6750 you'd pretty much have to be at full load to see those kinds of temps. Check your task manager. Enable the cpu time column and look at what's been running in terms of cpu time.

 

[mfenn]

66C is high for web browsing, but it nowhere near high enough to cause an actual problem. A 65nm chip like the Conroe you have is good until you get into the upper 80's.

The fact that you were able to take a screenshot of the problem tells me that it is a video card issue where corrupted data is getting written into the framebuffer. This is probably due to a driver bug which would be solved by updating. You're using XP, so if you're already running the latest driver available for that OS, it's time to upgrade to 7.

The reason that you don't see the problem in other programs is that recent versions of Firefox and Chrome both use the GPU to draw the entire window whereas most other XP programs just use software rendering. Downgrading to an older browser version would also likely make the problem go away.

There is an outside chance that your GPU is overheating or that you simply have some bad VRAM. However, I think that's less likely than a driver bug because you didn't report any outright crashes or lockups.

 

[imported_dvdman]

Yeah for an E6750 you'd pretty much have to be at full load to see those kinds of temps. Check your task manager. Enable the cpu time column and look at what's been running in terms of cpu time.

I checked that, however other than the "system idle process" there was nothing longer than 2 minutes. However, I had only had the PC on for about 2 hours when I checked as I rebooted.

66C is high for web browsing, but it nowhere near high enough to cause an actual problem. A 65nm chip like the Conroe you have is good until you get into the upper 80's.

The fact that you were able to take a screenshot of the problem tells me that it is a video card issue where corrupted data is getting written into the framebuffer. This is probably due to a driver bug which would be solved by updating. You're using XP, so if you're already running the latest driver available for that OS, it's time to upgrade to 7.

The reason that you don't see the problem in other programs is that recent versions of Firefox and Chrome both use the GPU to draw the entire window whereas most other XP programs just use software rendering. Downgrading to an older browser version would also likely make the problem go away.

There is an outside chance that your GPU is overheating or that you simply have some bad VRAM. However, I think that's less likely than a driver bug because you didn't report any outright crashes or lockups.

Great information - thank you! I thought about upgrading the drivers in-case it was a video card problem, but I have been running these drivers for a LONG time with no issues up till now; unless those browser changes are quite recent.

FWIW once I reboot the problems seems to go away temporarily.

 

[Zap]

I will check the fan & clean out the dust & apply some more paste as you suggested.

Start with just cleaning/blowing the dust out of the CPU fan and heatsink, along with maybe case fans. No need to replace the thermal compound unless blowing out the dust doesn't do the trick. That's like fixing a car that won't run by swapping the plugs. Wouldn't you at least first check to see if there was some gas in the tank?

 

[mfenn]

Great information - thank you! I thought about upgrading the drivers in-case it was a video card problem, but I have been running these drivers for a LONG time with no issues up till now; unless those browser changes are quite recent.

Your old drivers would continue to be fine if you kept running the programs that were released around the same time that they were. Software moves on, that's just the way of things. GPU acceleration was enabled by default in a pretty recent Firefox, version 16 maybe?

 

[T_Yamamoto]

I'd clean your computer out then update drivers.