Question Components Damaged Due to CPU Overheating?

jtyubv

Prominent
Aug 6, 2022
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Recently, I have been having odd issues on my computer. Occasionally (maybe 40% of the time) when I start it up from being fully shut down, the right audio channel is completely silent (I have tested different speakers, so it's something with the system). If I restart the machine, it remains silent. I have to shut it down fully and turn it back on for both audio channels to maybe function properly. It's very inconsistent.

Additionally, and I just observed this once so far for the first time today, one of the hard drives plugged into the system was not recognized when I booted it up. Windows did not recognize it anywhere (not in Explorer or Disk Management), even though I could feel the drive spinning. After fully shutting it down and starting up again, it was recognized and showed up just fine. I did not touch the sata and power cables.

I only started observing either of these issues after an All-In-One liquid cooler suddenly stopped working and the CPU temperatures shot up to 105 C. I was probably running it at these temperatures for a day or two before I realized what had happened, shut it down, and replaced the cooler with a new one.

Although the temperatures are fine now (60s), I'm wondering if that excessive heat for so long was enough to potentially damage the CPU or motherboard which could be causing the two inconsistent issues I noted above.

Any thoughts on this? What could make these issues inconsistent (essentially appearing randomly on a full boot up)? Could excessive temperatures have caused this, or is something else likely the culprit and the timing was purely coincidental?

For reference, the CPU is an i7 5960X from 2015. I'm on Windows 10. I've never had any of these issues until after the temperature problem.