intel motherboard & CPU with excessive heat and sound || A bulged capacitor near cpu

[Guest]

Well I have this desktop at my home which is obediently running for almost 10 years now, it is a custom build with below configuration. (got this in yr 2006)

CPU : Intel pentium D 3.0 Ghz
Motherboard: Intel 945 GCCR
Ram : 2.5 GB 800Mhz.
GPU: Sapphire Radeon HD 4350
HDD: 128 GB kingston SSD primary
160 GB Seagate spinning drive secondary.
A 350 Watt generic SMPS.

I have used this PC practially for everything, university projects, watching movies, programming, gaming (ranging from HL-1, gw2 to BF4), personal SIP and messaging server... you name it. Everytime I power on my pc i used to get this sense of "what a dependable machine this is". Having said that, lately the CPU fan (and the GPU fan and the SMPS fan) is making really annoying sound. As soon as % utilization of processor cranks up, the cpu fan sound cranks up as well. Its like i am sitting next to a revving car engine. And the heat!!, believe me, there were times i used to just leave the pc overnight just so that it would keep my room warm in those cold winter nights. I know this desktop has served me really well and i am not ready to throw it away to get a laptop. But i cant go on with the sound and the heat, i use the computer on daily basis for atleast good 5 hrs. So far i have replaced 2 failed SMPS in 10 years. few years ago i had observed that southbridge was heating up like a hot pan, so i had glued(with glue and thermal paste ofcourse) a small heatsink without fan. just like the one on my northbridge but relatively smaller in size ).
Just last week when i was dusting the cpu cabinet i observed a bulged capacitor near the CPU, next to parallel port. a black plastic coated capacitor with X on the top. Could it be due to the capacitor that CPU is behaving this way. the raging sound and % utilization and the heat.

I googled for this problem, and found the results saying bulging capacitor does not necessarily mean a bad capacitor. And to support that i havent come across blue screen error so far nor my pc has crashed or behaved abnormal.

So does anyone have possible solution to my peculiar problem?

--vick

 

[Dunlop0078]

Well the cpu fan is over ten years old, the bearing is probably shot. When cpu usage goes up the cpu gets hotter and fan speed also rises. I doubt the bulging capacitor is causing your issue. What are the cpu temps? Have you ever changed the cpu's thermal paste? Im sure its dried up by now. Abnormally high cpu usage is likely caused by your OS not hardware, you may have too many programs running in the background or something.

 

[misteriosly]

Raging sound is from fans, and the %utilization is because CPU and GPU are too old and they cant handle new games.
Even playing you tube is probably loading your CPU @40% or more, that's not even on FULL HD videos probably.
And the best solution is - get a new pc.
You could still replace that bulged capacitor, but that wont fix the heat.
Just get something new, there are cheap ones that could give you like 5 times better performance, which wont be the current best, but compared to your platform, will be like night and day difference.

 

[Guest]

Thanks for the response @Dunlop & @misteriously.

@Dunlop: Long back i had checked the cpu temperature, it were around 60 same was GPU. No i havent changed the thermal paste since the first time i plugged processor onto botherboard. Probably i will clean up and apply fresh thermal paste this weekend.

@Misteriously: at idle condition, CPU utilization hovers around 2-4% util, when i use youtube (without HD as you said), or working on eclipse, it runs at around 50%+ on both cores. Do you recommend replacing just the CPU or just the motherboard, or both?

what bothers me is that at my office, everybody(including me) work on desktops which are HP Z220 running on core i5(which i cant afford as it costs close to $1000). And no matter how many chrome tabs i open or how many eclipse instances i open, and even if the cpu utilization goes to 40-50% on 4 cores. it doesnt make any sound. the only thing i ever hear from it is a faint sound of spinning hard drive when its reading something from disk. But my personal computer at home, I can hear it revving from next room.

 

[misteriosly]

Well, to be honest,usually i would say that if your current performance is acceptable you could fix it.
You can change thermal paste, all the fans, add some fan to help the airflow, change the bulged capacitor(and all other capacitors of the same model to keep it save).
But looking @ how old this PC is, i am not sure its worth it.
If you tell us what budget you could spend, we can make a build for you, that would suit your needs.
You can reuse Monitor + hdd + ssd and maybe the case, just tell us what model/make the case is.

Something like http://pcpartpicker.com/list/QT24sJ would be like 5-6 times better than yours. Quiet and would suit your needs i guess.
Depends how much gaming you want out of it, you could even get cheaper video & psu.