Could I have damaged the cpu?

[annoyedandconfused]

So I was cleaning out my computer with some compressed air(I read this is not a good thing) when I accidentally held the can in an upright position and sprayed it into the heat sink. Now my computer will not post at all. Although this problem has been happening for a while now, my computer was still able to boot up sometimes, but now it won't boot at all. All the fans are running, bu nothing pops up onto the monitor. Could it be the motherboard? I don't think its the PSU as it is quite new. So basically my question is, could the moisture from the compressed air have damaged my cpu? Or is it another component.

 

[AdrianPerry]

Compressed Air usually is the recommended way to go about cleaning your PC. Unless you physically took the CPU chip out of the ZIF socket its very unlikely you have damaged it in any way. (usually damage would be caused here by bent/damaged pins on the underside of the chip).

A couple of things to try:
Re-seat the RAM, take it out and pop it back in
Take the cooler off the CPU, clean away any existing thermal paste and then re-apply thermal paste and place heatsink back on.
Check your 24pin motherboard connection is properly attached and check the secondary motherboard connection (4/8pin) is also properly attached.

It could be due to dust that your PC was experiencing boot problems before. Although there usually has to be quite a large amount of dust before components start being effected.

Stick to anti-static procedures - wear a wrist band/ground yourself before touching components. In a worst case scenario you could have damaged components within your PC if you touched any of them and gave off a static charge. Components can be damaged with ALOT less charge than us humans can even feel.

EDIT: Is your PC booting at all? Or is it just that you dont get a display?

Usually you can tell if your PC is booting because the CPU fan will be running, any case fans will be running and your case might have a power light LED and a hard disk drive LED - also check if your graphics card fan is running (if it has one). If all of this works and your PC is buzzing away and you just get no display - if possible test a different cable, test a different monitor if possible aswell. If neither of these work theres a chance that the display port on the I/O panel has become damaged in some way.

 

[diellur]

Where did you read that? It's nonsense - as AdrianPerry has said, compressed air is a recommended way. Of course, you can get small vacuum cleaners for PCs etc, but compressed air is fine. There's a risk of moving dust into a component with air, but it's a small likelihood and if you are careful about how you use the air it's unlikely to happen. Any moisture from using compressed air evaporates very quickly, so by the time you put your PC on it has gone.

 

[annoyedandconfused]

Compressed Air usually is the recommended way to go about cleaning your PC. Unless you physically took the CPU chip out of the ZIF socket its very unlikely you have damaged it in any way. (usually damage would be caused here by bent/damaged pins on the underside of the chip).

A couple of things to try:
Re-seat the RAM, take it out and pop it back in
Take the cooler off the CPU, clean away any existing thermal paste and then re-apply thermal paste and place heatsink back on.
Check your 24pin motherboard connection is properly attached and check the secondary motherboard connection (4/8pin) is also properly attached.

It could be due to dust that your PC was experiencing boot problems before. Although there usually has to be quite a large amount of dust before components start being effected.

Stick to anti-static procedures - wear a wrist band/ground yourself before touching components. In a worst case scenario you could have damaged components within your PC if you touched any of them and gave off a static charge. Components can be damaged with ALOT less charge than us humans can even feel.

EDIT: Is your PC booting at all? Or is it just that you dont get a display?

Usually you can tell if your PC is booting because the CPU fan will be running, any case fans will be running and your case might have a power light LED and a hard disk drive LED - also check if your graphics card fan is running (if it has one). If all of this works and your PC is buzzing away and you just get no display - if possible test a different cable, test a different monitor if possible aswell. If neither of these work theres a chance that the display port on the I/O panel has become damaged in some way.

Thanks for all the replies. Yes my pc does boot up and every fan is spinning, including cpu fan and graphics card fan. I have tested my monitor on another computer and it works fine. If the I/O panel is damaged, then replacing the motherboard would fix it right?

 

[kajabla]

Yes, that should fix the problem. Is it out of warranty? You could certainly RMA.

 

[AdrianPerry]

Just a thought;

Im guessing you disconnected all your cables when you cleaned your PC.

Older machines often have a display port on the motherboard, but also a display port on the graphics card. If your PC has a graphics card and your plugging the monitor into the motherboard output, then it wont work.

Double check to see if you have plugged the monitor into the graphics card display port.

If this isn't the case, then yes, its down to a motherboard fault.

 

[kajabla]

^+1

 

[synthaside]

I' recently encountered a problem due to electrolisis between the PCIE slot and graphics cards that caused the conductivity between the two to degrade .

It started off life as a finicky somtimes refusing to enter post problem the lights would go on fans would spin up but the monitor wouldnt kick in and boot the BIOS ,I could solve by reseating the gpu and rebooting , somtimes many many times until a good connection was made , eventually once i decided to do a rebuild the machine refused to boot for good.

I've now Bought a new mainboard as i assumed this would be the problem as its rather old now, but encountered the same issue so ive just RMA'ed the card as it had a 3 year warrenty.

 

[kajabla]

Incidentally, compressed air doesn't contain moisture. It's not actually air that has been compressed; it's all difluoroethane or something similar, usually. It can, however, cause condensation when it cools off whatever you spray it on.
This still should have no effect on your computer, especially not in the heatsink. You can clean off a CPU with liquids with no problem.

 

[zedero]

I have just sent my computer to HP for warranty to fix. They told me to take the RAM out and it worked! But it still took more "effort" to the fans to start up. Good luck.

 

[annoyedandconfused]

Just a thought;

Im guessing you disconnected all your cables when you cleaned your PC.

Older machines often have a display port on the motherboard, but also a display port on the graphics card. If your PC has a graphics card and your plugging the monitor into the motherboard output, then it wont work.

Double check to see if you have plugged the monitor into the graphics card display port.

If this isn't the case, then yes, its down to a motherboard fault.

Yeah I double checked that, and synthaside that's really interesting, but I don't think it happened to mine as I tried putting the graphics card on both pci-e slots and none of them worked. Getting a new motherboard soon.

Thanks for all the help