The oldest PC that I still use regularly is based on a Gigabyte GA-7ZXE system board, with an old T-Bird 1.33 cpu in it that was always warm-natured, I believe. This has been my eMail and Inet messaging PC for most of its life, during which up to now it's been almost trouble-free. It's just over three years old now and suddenly it is becoming a problem.
According to MBM-5, its "rest" Temps had been about 36/45 C (board temp/cpu temp) with the GF 3 Ti-200 video card it had in it. With that card, it never got hotter than 55 C, and that was rare. Back when it was fairly new, I used it some with a couple of aviation combat simulation games -- otherwise, it typically ran no warmer than 49 C for the cpu. The fan on the Ti-200 had stopped, and I had a Ti-4200 as a spare on hand. Even at idle, that card was enough hotter that the Temps were more like 44/54 and up around 60 when working.
Swapping in an adapter and an 80 mm fan in place of the 60 mm on the heat sink tamed that heat situation down. Not all the way, but much better, at 42/49 C idling, and 47/54 working. That was a couple of months ago. Last summer, one of the PC's I assembled here was a replacement LAN File Server/ Print Server to replace an old P-II/450 I'd used for about four years. I bought most of its components from eBay, and chose a more recent GA-7ZXE board to build it around (revision 2.1, while the original system is the 1.0).
The older ZXE now has the same 1.33 Thunderbird cpu it started with
512 MB's of RAM (whatever was on sale)
No-name White Box FX 5200 video
NEC 4-disk CD Juke Box Reader
Enermax 300 Watt psu
Intel 536 EP Modem
TDK CD-RW
Realtek NIC
Unknown 3 1/2 Floppy
Maxtor 40 Gb Hdd as Master
INM Deskstar 40 Gb as Slave
Creative Soundblaster Live 5.1 sound card
(Had been) run on Windows 98 SE most of the time; W2K dual boot available
The newer ZXE has a Thoroughbred B core AMD XP 2600 cpu
Visiontek NIC
Nspire 350 Watt psu
512 MB's of PNY RAM
PNY GF 4 Ti-4200 Video
Diamond MX 400 Sound
Sony dru 510A DVD-RW
Lite-On Combo CD/DVD Reader
Seagate 7200 80 Gb Hdd as Master
Maxtor 7200 60 Gb Hdd as Slave Drive
(Had been) run with Windows 2000 most of the time; with W98se as dual boot
Almost all of the above component lists are swapped from the setup of a week ago. On Monday, 1-10-05, the older PC became flaky and unstable twice within a day, and as a matter of fact, from being able to run literally months at a time 24-7 (with W98, it's supposed to be hard to do), but over the preceding weekend of PC use, the old one had gotten unstable at least twice in 48 hours and locked up or otherwise became unusable. I noticed cpu Temp readings of 60 C from MBM-5 that may have been associated with the flaky behavior.
Or something on the MB was failing and causing the cpu to work harder. Don't know yet. I shut down that PC Monday night, at which point it was at 58 C, and possibly on the edge of further instability. Next day, it didn't want to boot up. It couldn't find either system disk (both master and slave have an OS installed, and in the setup are the #1 and #2 boot choices). Even the BIOS was acting strangely, it seemed. I tried to use the hard drive setup page, and was told there were no hard drives attached.
To avoid any huge loss of time offline, I pulled all the working components and swapped all into the newer ZXE machine. It went flawlessly -- not a hitch at all that way. The older PC kept on being stubborn, but I couldn't turn up any bargain replacement ZXE's on eBay. I swapped out the pretty "round" ATA cables for new ribbon cables, and the BIOS could find the drives swapped from the File Server PC. It still doesn't like the Modem, NIC, or Sound Card that matched to the OS installs on the Server's drives, though. I had some trouble previously on the second ZXE with the Modem and Sound Card setups, so I probably need to remove one or the other and move the remaining one to a different PCI slot and see what happens then.
But that aspect is small potatoes if the source of the sudden heat and instability situation is still uncorrected. I can't imagine how the round ATA cables could create either symptom, even if on the following day, it was coincidentally the cables keeping the BIOS from seeing the Hdd's. The FX 5200 seems to run much cooler than the Ti-4200, but I still saw a couple of instances of 55 C Temps on the T-Bird cpu yesterday when I had that PC running for several hours, and the only work it might've done is that I have Diskkeeper in the background maintaining the drives' defragged state. I didn't see the Diskkeeper icon in the tray either time I spotted the medium-warm temp readings, though.
Subsequent to swapping out the older ZXE's round cables, I found that the setup had an August, 2001 date in it, no HD data at all, 100 MHz RAM settings instead of 133, just generally a stirred up setup. I have reset the onboard sound as "disabled", but on each reboot now, the Hardware Wizard wants to install software for the AC-97. That was never a problem previously. Boot-up seems quite slow now, but that was always the case with the particular Windows 98 install that had been on the File Server, where the drive came from (and perhaps part of why I had W2K as default in/on that PC?)
I don't really know what happened a week ago to set off the symptoms, and don't know if I should expect it to get worse. So far, I found only some overpriced (high starting bid) ZXE combos with cpus being auctioned, and none of the Gigabyte MB's so old are still in the retail channel. My budget for PC spending is already way past over-spent, and I *really* can't spend a lot more soon. Not without paying a penalty on the property taxes, or the utility bill, from being late.
The detailed description is just in case anyone knows of similar occurrences. I posted a shorter query on the MB Forum a week ago, no joy there.
According to MBM-5, its "rest" Temps had been about 36/45 C (board temp/cpu temp) with the GF 3 Ti-200 video card it had in it. With that card, it never got hotter than 55 C, and that was rare. Back when it was fairly new, I used it some with a couple of aviation combat simulation games -- otherwise, it typically ran no warmer than 49 C for the cpu. The fan on the Ti-200 had stopped, and I had a Ti-4200 as a spare on hand. Even at idle, that card was enough hotter that the Temps were more like 44/54 and up around 60 when working.
Swapping in an adapter and an 80 mm fan in place of the 60 mm on the heat sink tamed that heat situation down. Not all the way, but much better, at 42/49 C idling, and 47/54 working. That was a couple of months ago. Last summer, one of the PC's I assembled here was a replacement LAN File Server/ Print Server to replace an old P-II/450 I'd used for about four years. I bought most of its components from eBay, and chose a more recent GA-7ZXE board to build it around (revision 2.1, while the original system is the 1.0).
The older ZXE now has the same 1.33 Thunderbird cpu it started with
512 MB's of RAM (whatever was on sale)
No-name White Box FX 5200 video
NEC 4-disk CD Juke Box Reader
Enermax 300 Watt psu
Intel 536 EP Modem
TDK CD-RW
Realtek NIC
Unknown 3 1/2 Floppy
Maxtor 40 Gb Hdd as Master
INM Deskstar 40 Gb as Slave
Creative Soundblaster Live 5.1 sound card
(Had been) run on Windows 98 SE most of the time; W2K dual boot available
The newer ZXE has a Thoroughbred B core AMD XP 2600 cpu
Visiontek NIC
Nspire 350 Watt psu
512 MB's of PNY RAM
PNY GF 4 Ti-4200 Video
Diamond MX 400 Sound
Sony dru 510A DVD-RW
Lite-On Combo CD/DVD Reader
Seagate 7200 80 Gb Hdd as Master
Maxtor 7200 60 Gb Hdd as Slave Drive
(Had been) run with Windows 2000 most of the time; with W98se as dual boot
Almost all of the above component lists are swapped from the setup of a week ago. On Monday, 1-10-05, the older PC became flaky and unstable twice within a day, and as a matter of fact, from being able to run literally months at a time 24-7 (with W98, it's supposed to be hard to do), but over the preceding weekend of PC use, the old one had gotten unstable at least twice in 48 hours and locked up or otherwise became unusable. I noticed cpu Temp readings of 60 C from MBM-5 that may have been associated with the flaky behavior.
Or something on the MB was failing and causing the cpu to work harder. Don't know yet. I shut down that PC Monday night, at which point it was at 58 C, and possibly on the edge of further instability. Next day, it didn't want to boot up. It couldn't find either system disk (both master and slave have an OS installed, and in the setup are the #1 and #2 boot choices). Even the BIOS was acting strangely, it seemed. I tried to use the hard drive setup page, and was told there were no hard drives attached.
To avoid any huge loss of time offline, I pulled all the working components and swapped all into the newer ZXE machine. It went flawlessly -- not a hitch at all that way. The older PC kept on being stubborn, but I couldn't turn up any bargain replacement ZXE's on eBay. I swapped out the pretty "round" ATA cables for new ribbon cables, and the BIOS could find the drives swapped from the File Server PC. It still doesn't like the Modem, NIC, or Sound Card that matched to the OS installs on the Server's drives, though. I had some trouble previously on the second ZXE with the Modem and Sound Card setups, so I probably need to remove one or the other and move the remaining one to a different PCI slot and see what happens then.
But that aspect is small potatoes if the source of the sudden heat and instability situation is still uncorrected. I can't imagine how the round ATA cables could create either symptom, even if on the following day, it was coincidentally the cables keeping the BIOS from seeing the Hdd's. The FX 5200 seems to run much cooler than the Ti-4200, but I still saw a couple of instances of 55 C Temps on the T-Bird cpu yesterday when I had that PC running for several hours, and the only work it might've done is that I have Diskkeeper in the background maintaining the drives' defragged state. I didn't see the Diskkeeper icon in the tray either time I spotted the medium-warm temp readings, though.
Subsequent to swapping out the older ZXE's round cables, I found that the setup had an August, 2001 date in it, no HD data at all, 100 MHz RAM settings instead of 133, just generally a stirred up setup. I have reset the onboard sound as "disabled", but on each reboot now, the Hardware Wizard wants to install software for the AC-97. That was never a problem previously. Boot-up seems quite slow now, but that was always the case with the particular Windows 98 install that had been on the File Server, where the drive came from (and perhaps part of why I had W2K as default in/on that PC?)
I don't really know what happened a week ago to set off the symptoms, and don't know if I should expect it to get worse. So far, I found only some overpriced (high starting bid) ZXE combos with cpus being auctioned, and none of the Gigabyte MB's so old are still in the retail channel. My budget for PC spending is already way past over-spent, and I *really* can't spend a lot more soon. Not without paying a penalty on the property taxes, or the utility bill, from being late.
The detailed description is just in case anyone knows of similar occurrences. I posted a shorter query on the MB Forum a week ago, no joy there.
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