OT: Celeron system & PSU question....

[GeoffS]

I'm helping a workmate with a PC here... she's got a 1.7gHz Celeron system. The AOpen mobo showed bulging caps and booted sporatically. I've put an Asus P4B266-C motherboard in there and it boots to the BIOS screen with no problems.

Now, I haven't dabbled with Intel systems for a while...

1. At idle, with the monster Intel hs/fan (that makes surprisingly little noise) spinning at 2360 rpm (seems low to me, I'm used to big screaming fans) and the chip is running 47.5C.

2. The readouts on the PSU (Enlight, peak 300w) show he 5v running at 5.21v (pretty steadily) and the 12v running around 11v... seems to me that's not a good thing. I have no periperals running at the moment (no harddrives, CDs, floppies, etc)... just the mobo, hs/fan & vidcard.

Pls excuse my naivity, but are either of these issues for this system?

Geoff

 

[BlackMountainCow]

Well, from my experience, the 11V could be a problem, especially as you have no periperals running right now. If that's a work PC, I assume that there won't be any high end gfx cards in there or 8 case fans, but even a HD, floppy and CD drive will even lower thise 11V. Some mobos react pretty bad on such a low starting voltage. And as far as I know, today the 5V lines are getting more and more unimportant. The 3V and 12V lines are the most heavily used ones.

The temp isn't perfect but it's solid I guess. Is there a way you can turn up the speed of the fan? Is it temp controlled? What I once did was just to run the monitor wire to the mainboard, so it assumes that there is a fan but I ran the other wires into a normal plug and thus raised the RPMs for the fan. Maybe not the best solution, but it's been working for like 2 years now.

:beer:BMC

 

[GeoffS]

Thanks BMC...

This is a home PC of someone that only use it for low-end stuff...

The fan doesn't seem to be anything special.. stock Intel plugs right into the mobo... I don't see anything to regulate the speed of the fan anywhere and watched the temp climb after booting without seeing significant increase in the fans speed...

Geoff

 

[BlackMountainCow]

Well, if it doesn't hit 60 °C or above with 100% load I wouldn't really care about it unless this is a "recruited" machine that's gonna crunch 24/7 cause then the high temp will shorten the CPU's life significantly!

 

[amdxborg]

We have a couple of those 1.7cel's at work...That's a kinda normal temp for them, they get hot from doing nothing and cpu usage are usually up and down the whole time...

 

[mechBgon]

If you want to be sure of your voltage readings, use a multimeter to test the voltages at the ATX cable and the drive cables. Mobos can be quite inaccurate sometimes.