Help resolve this weird problem

[ta8689]

ok, so i helped my friend build a pc. We used my old 7800gt (works 100% great in my pc) and he got an amd 64 3200 anda msi knwhatever sli mobo. it has a heatpipe. so does my a8n-sli premium. but his heatsinks get really hot. the problem is, whenever in games or hardware intensive tasks, the computer slows down. Like when we play COD2, it drops from 40 fps to maybe 15 fps. it happens, and it doesnt go back till we restart. We figured, gee must be overhaeting. so we took side off and blew window fan inside. works beautifully. so we got watercooling. I spent my entire evening installing a watercooling system on it. covers cpu and gpu. figured, ok must be ok. well same problem. but if we put the fan on the open case, all is good. since the only thing that we didnt cover heat-wise is the mobo, could the mobo be overheating and causeing a system slowdown? temps stay WELL BELOW what my computer runs at as far as cpu and gpu go. we dont have any utilities or anythign to tell us mobo temps. we have a sensor on the cpu and the gpu tells us through the nvidia contol panel. those idle at 32 C. I think friday, ill drive over to tigerdirect with him (naperville outlet, where he bought it) and exchange i for a
diff mobo
Would you guys agree with this reasoning? I doubt the hard drive would do this... the ram is some value ram that isnt overclocked. neither is cpu. Thansk guys

 

[knght990]

Prolly an nforce4 overheating problem. I've seen alot of people solve this by just changing the thermal paste on the heatsink. If the board has a passive heatsink on the nforce chip touch it and see how hot it is. The asus a8n you have refernced has a fan on top of the nforce chip. There are a few with a heatpipe configuration that is premounted to the board. The fans and heatpipe boards seem to have overcome the overheating problem of this chip.
-tl

 

[ta8689]

well this board does have a heatpipe. And the heatsink is quite hot to touch

 

[AMCRambler]

The water cooling kit you have, is the radiator mounted external to the case? I'm thinking the case temp might be too hot. Perhaps you have a fan blowing the wrong way. Intake in the front, exhaust in the back. If you got a thermometer you should be able to check the case temps. Just put it inside and test with the case clsoed and the case open. Shouldn't be much hotter than 50-55C I should think. Any hotter and I'm thinking you'll have some major probs.

 

[1N0V471V]

Try taking the machine out of the case?

 

[AMCRambler]

Originally posted by: 1N0V471V
Try taking the machine out of the case?

He's already determined it's a heat issue. Taking it out of the case won't help him troubleshoot that any farther. I think he's go to make sure he's got a sufficiently low case temp when it's all buttoned up and if not, get some more fans or faster fans in there. If noise is an issue, you can always get a fan controller so that you can turn them up while playing a game and then when you don't need the extra cooling, turn them down.