CPU overheating on intensive disk IO

[paulney]

I have an old build running linux:
1Ghz Athlon, a couple of SATA hard drives.

Since the oem cooler failed a year ago or so, I installed a huge ThermalTake cooler on it, and everything was fine until a couple of days ago. As part of the backup for my other PC I transferred some large archives over the network onto the linux box without any problems. But now that I try to read them back over ethernet, the linux system overheats in minutes.

Cooler is spinning, I've checked. It is more than adequate for this kind of CPU (I think). No other CPU-intensive work is happening on the linux side. But reading and transferring a large file (1.8Gbs) reliably overheats and kills the box.

What could be the culprit and what can I do?
Thanks.

 

[dma0991]

I am not too sure about the CPU overheating is the cause of the problem. Maybe you could check the temps before it crashes to be sure that the CPU is the main cause.

It could be that the HDD are problematic and overheats can causing the OS to stall. I have a 2.5" HDD made into an external and bad sectors on the drive causes it to constantly run as the transfer rate drops to bytes/sec and heats up. It reaches till a point then it would disconnect the USB connection and reconnect.

 

[stahlhart]

Try remounting your cooler with some new, good quality paste. This happens a lot for me with my XP2500; will run fine for a while, mabye several months to a year, then temps will start creeping upward. Re-do the mount and all is well again.

Those (now ten-year-old) Athlons seem to really run hot, to the point that I think the thermal compound starts to eventually break down.