So we had our fourth (of maybe fifteen or so) GX270's go out on us today due to what the BIOS reports as a thermal event. We're having to go through the usual red tape with Dell to get the motherboards and CPU heatsink fans replaced, but in the meantime, we're struggling to develop some sort of preventive strategy.
I was thinking that maybe the thermal event is associated with the chipset or a combination chipset/CPU heatsink fan. On one machine that started to fail, I noticed the motherboard's passive chipset heatsink was hot to the touch (to the point of burning my finger), whereas on another GX270 that was running fine, the chipset was nowhere near as hot. In addition, on this particular machine, the CPU heatsink fan was not spinning very fast at all (compared to other GX270's that are fine).
So I don't know if it's maybe the chipset and the CPU heatsink, but do you think it might help to get discrete graphics cards for them? Isn't the Intel Extreme Graphics GPU part of the northbridge? If so, is it possible that using discrete graphics would effectively permanently lower the chipset's temperature? Or would the use of AGP graphics make it even worse (in terms of heat)?
BTW, our GX270's uses the Intel i865 chipset and the s478 Prescott core P4's.
I was thinking that maybe the thermal event is associated with the chipset or a combination chipset/CPU heatsink fan. On one machine that started to fail, I noticed the motherboard's passive chipset heatsink was hot to the touch (to the point of burning my finger), whereas on another GX270 that was running fine, the chipset was nowhere near as hot. In addition, on this particular machine, the CPU heatsink fan was not spinning very fast at all (compared to other GX270's that are fine).
So I don't know if it's maybe the chipset and the CPU heatsink, but do you think it might help to get discrete graphics cards for them? Isn't the Intel Extreme Graphics GPU part of the northbridge? If so, is it possible that using discrete graphics would effectively permanently lower the chipset's temperature? Or would the use of AGP graphics make it even worse (in terms of heat)?
BTW, our GX270's uses the Intel i865 chipset and the s478 Prescott core P4's.
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