I had* an Athlon XP 2500 barton - overclocked to 3200 on an A7N8X Deluxe. It worked great for the month that I had it, no problems even though I leave it on all day and often max it out a 100% CPU usage rendering stuff or gaming.
But Yesturday, I was playing some Unreal Tournament 2004, and about 1 hour into it my computer just shuts off. The "Power on" LED was still lit on the case. I pressed it to turn it off and restart the computer thinking it was a random crash (the PC had never crashed before by the way, not even a blue screen)
But it wouldn't start. I unplugged the power cable, unplugged all periferals, plugged them back in and tried to start it. The power button does not work so I try turning the PSU on and off (there is a switch on the back of mine). The motherboard's "System powered" green LED is lit showing there is power to the system, however when I turn it on, the fan's twitch a little, and the Fan and Case LEDs flash on but the CPU doesn't even start. Nothing else happens when I try to start it, the bios doesn't beep, the screen doesn't change, the harddrives don't start.
Ah by the way, it was also a really hot day, 85 degrees outside, and about 80 (I'm guessing) in my room.
When I opened my case after a few attempts of turning it on, I noticed it was unusually hot, like very unusually hot. I touched the heatsink to get an idea of how hot it was and it burned me slightly, it was very hot. Well, put them together and I figured the CPU is fried. But usually when CPUs die from overclocking they first make some random restarts or crashes or blue screens, I never got any and infact I've never seen the Core temperature go higher than 55C, and that would be after 4 hours of gaming. The Case temp is also cool, 25-35C depending on how long it's been on. I have 2 case fans, a side one blowing in and a top one blowing out. Also my heatsink rocks, Thermalright SLK-800U - picture: http://www.overclockers.com/articles726/sl1.jpg
I took off the heatsink to see what's up with the processor - I had some Arctic Silver 5 on it, however I'm not the one who put it on, I had someone else do it. Thing is that most of the Silver had spread off the core and infact you could easily see the core besides for some thin splotches of the thermal paste. There wasn't all that much on the base of the heatsink either, but then again I think the Arctic silver is supposed to get absorbed by the heatsink. Oh well, I don't know if that's bad or not, I'm going to guess no.
But I'm still left with a processor that doesn't work.
Could anyone who's maybe had experiance with this before help me out? Is it definatly dead, or did for some reason the PSU blew out (350W, I only have 1 harddrive, 1CDrom drive, 2 sticks of 256 PC3200, GeforceMX440, and a Sound Blaster Live soundcard - the 350W should be more than enough.
Also I went out and got an Athlon XP 2800 Barton just incase the chip is dead but I haven't installed it yet.
I read somewhere that you could try to reset the CMOS, but I don't want to mess with that. I didn't overclock RAM and the voltages for the CPU (1.776) and the FSB (200x11) were obviously fine considering they worked for a month and the CPU was always between 35 and 55C
But Yesturday, I was playing some Unreal Tournament 2004, and about 1 hour into it my computer just shuts off. The "Power on" LED was still lit on the case. I pressed it to turn it off and restart the computer thinking it was a random crash (the PC had never crashed before by the way, not even a blue screen)
But it wouldn't start. I unplugged the power cable, unplugged all periferals, plugged them back in and tried to start it. The power button does not work so I try turning the PSU on and off (there is a switch on the back of mine). The motherboard's "System powered" green LED is lit showing there is power to the system, however when I turn it on, the fan's twitch a little, and the Fan and Case LEDs flash on but the CPU doesn't even start. Nothing else happens when I try to start it, the bios doesn't beep, the screen doesn't change, the harddrives don't start.
Ah by the way, it was also a really hot day, 85 degrees outside, and about 80 (I'm guessing) in my room.
When I opened my case after a few attempts of turning it on, I noticed it was unusually hot, like very unusually hot. I touched the heatsink to get an idea of how hot it was and it burned me slightly, it was very hot. Well, put them together and I figured the CPU is fried. But usually when CPUs die from overclocking they first make some random restarts or crashes or blue screens, I never got any and infact I've never seen the Core temperature go higher than 55C, and that would be after 4 hours of gaming. The Case temp is also cool, 25-35C depending on how long it's been on. I have 2 case fans, a side one blowing in and a top one blowing out. Also my heatsink rocks, Thermalright SLK-800U - picture: http://www.overclockers.com/articles726/sl1.jpg
I took off the heatsink to see what's up with the processor - I had some Arctic Silver 5 on it, however I'm not the one who put it on, I had someone else do it. Thing is that most of the Silver had spread off the core and infact you could easily see the core besides for some thin splotches of the thermal paste. There wasn't all that much on the base of the heatsink either, but then again I think the Arctic silver is supposed to get absorbed by the heatsink. Oh well, I don't know if that's bad or not, I'm going to guess no.
But I'm still left with a processor that doesn't work.
Could anyone who's maybe had experiance with this before help me out? Is it definatly dead, or did for some reason the PSU blew out (350W, I only have 1 harddrive, 1CDrom drive, 2 sticks of 256 PC3200, GeforceMX440, and a Sound Blaster Live soundcard - the 350W should be more than enough.
Also I went out and got an Athlon XP 2800 Barton just incase the chip is dead but I haven't installed it yet.
I read somewhere that you could try to reset the CMOS, but I don't want to mess with that. I didn't overclock RAM and the voltages for the CPU (1.776) and the FSB (200x11) were obviously fine considering they worked for a month and the CPU was always between 35 and 55C
Do you think resetting the CMOS would work? Like I said I already bought a new chip, could I just put that one in? Still though, I'd really like to find out what the hell went wrong since it's so unlikely it fried, even though it was unusually hot when I checked out the heatsink and the case temperature. There was a very slight smell of burnt silicon, something like what the back of your PSU would smell like if anyone's ever bothered smelling it 
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