Is my mobo or graphics card kaput??

themarcus

Hi,

I built a PC on XP a few years back with an Epox ep-8kda3j mobo and a Radeon 9600 Pro-Advantage 256MB Graphics Card.

For the past week or so I've been having trouble with it... it runs fine until I play a video or a game - it usually lasts a minute or two and then theres a beeping sound like a french siren from the motherboard, about 5 seconds later everything freezes and the computer powers off. I checked the display on the mobo and it had "F5" on it - can't find anywhere to decode that though

Seeing as the problem relates to games and videos I presume its the graphics card??? The cpu is an AMD 64 3200 and it has 1.5Mb RAM so it's not like the pc should be struggling....

Any ideas? I'm kinda sentimental about this computer so I'd rather not have to get a new one!

PogMoThoin

Could be overheating. Have you cleaned out all the dust? Check that the cpu fan runs ok, run an application like prime95 to stress the cpu to maximum temperatures. Monitor your temperatures with speedfan. Maybe its time to replace the thermal compoud on the cpu cooler.

themarcus

PogMoThoin wrote: »

Could be overheating. Have you cleaned out all the dust? Check that the cpu fan runs ok, run an application like prime95 to stress the cpu to maximum temperatures. Monitor your temperatures with speedfan. Maybe its time to replace the thermal compoud on the cpu cooler.

Thanks I'll try running that app when I get home...
'Thermal compound' - that means the heat sink n fan right??

I did take a look inside and the fans seem to be fine. When I'm running azureus and firefox and a few other heavy apps at the same time everything is fine though, so I'm not sure it's the cpu...

I can't actually get a look at the cooling fan for the graphics card cos of the angle the card sits at. It did have a lot of dust on it but I got most of the dust away from the fan and heatsink, but it still crashes...

I'll let ye know how it works out with speedfan....

Snowbat

Thermal compound (aka thermal grease, thermally conductive paste) is the substance between the processor and the heatsink. Many heatsinks come with a small square of compound in a solid form that melts into place during the first few hours in use. To reuse an old heatsink or to use a more expensive compound with better thermal properties, you may wish to scrape off the existing substance and apply new compound (generally available in a paste or liquid form).

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thermal_compound

Thermally conductive paste improves the efficiency of a heatsink by filling air gaps that occur when the irregular surface of a heat generating component is pressed against the irregular surface of a heatsink, air being approximately 8000 times less efficient at conducting heat (see Thermal Conductivity) than, for example, aluminium, a common heatsink material.[2] Surface imperfections inherently arise from limitations in manufacturing technology and range in size from visible and tactile flaws such as machining marks or casting irregularities to sub-microscopic ones not visible to the naked eye.

Both high power handling transistors, like those in a conventional audio amplifier, and high speed integrated circuits, such as the central processing unit (CPU) of a personal computer, generate sufficient heat to require the use of thermal grease in addition to the heatsink. High temperatures cause semiconductors to change their switching properties to the point of failure while CPU power dissipation overheating causes logic errors as heat raises electrical resistance on the multi-nanometer wide circuits of the CPU core.

The alarm you describe does sound like a thermal alarm from the motherboard indicating the temperature of the CPU or motherboard has exceeded the warning level set in your BIOS. See what speedfan reports or get into the BIOS when you reboot and check the temperatures reported in the hardware monitor section.

themarcus

Thanks, I'll have a look at it soon - hopefully its just the thermal compound then