Question from someone who does not know what he is doing

[ciaus]

Hi,

I have a long winded question for anyone willing to help,
I recently bought a P4 3GHZ CPU 775 socket.
I installed onto the mother board (first time doing this) and kicked it off.
PC runs fine everything is going well until I run games.
The games (COTD2/FABLE/FEAR) all run fine for about 20 to 30 min, then it hangs for 10 min, runs again for 10 min and hangs again, keep repeating the sequence to get the idea of the annoyence of this issue.

I checked everything on the system Graphics cards, fans, PSU, RAM but I think (guess?) the issue is caused by the CPU over heating.

I reseated the CPU and found a wierd grey rubber substance on top of the chip when I removed the heatsink (this was no there when installed last week), this I rubbed off, there was none of this on the heat sink.

Finally the questions,

1) Is this grey substance meant to be on the cpu/heatsink?
2) If not is this a sign that the heatsink is not seated properly on the cpu.
3) Or do I need a new cooling system for my CPU.

Any help with this would be appreciated.

 

[opteron]

The grey rubbery stuff I think you will find is the Heatpad which transfers heat from the CPU to the heatsink. Removing this WILL cause problems as the thermal transfer will only work if you get perfect positioning of the heatsink against the chip if not using a pad. You would be best advised to get some Arctic Silver 5 and replace the pad with that. It works much better and I think others here will agree.

Just to add, the heatpads are made of wax so you will need to clean the surface of the cpu and heatsink as well as possible before adding Arctic Silver. Using something alcohol based Is good as It evaporates away so is harder to short pins with.

 

[apache_lives]

that grey stuff is the TIM or thermal interface mat, and yes the excess goes off to the sides cause there aint supposed to be alot between the cpu and hsf - only enough to fill the gaps and allow heat to efficently pass through.

Your system sounds like its throttling due to overheating (cpu starts slowing down to counter the heat rather then shut down), if you want to confirm that, take off the side pannel and use a room fan and stick that facing the computer and do some task that usually causes issues - it might take longer with the fan.

To fix a cooling issue like that install some more case fans (front ones sucking in and rear ones blowing out), if that aint working then buy a bigger more efficent HSF and that should solve overheating issues, oh - while your at it clean the cpu and hsf base and buy and apply some arctic silver v thermal pase - one of the best.

 

[ciaus]

Hi Opteron,

Thanks for the help I really appreciate it.

ciaus

 

[ciaus]

Thanks Apache, I well get the artic silver ASAP and look into a new zalman cpu cooling system. One last quick question, is there any product out ther that allows you to power multiple fans ina system besides the MB, my mother board only has two pan slots, one for the cpu and one for the system.

Again thanks for all the help.

ciaus

 

[slvr_phoenix]

You would be best advised to get some Arctic Silver 5 and replace the pad with that. It works much better and I think others here will agree.

Actually, I don't agree. Unless Intel has changed their pads significantly (which I doubt) then it's darn near as good as AS5. Intel's pads are good stuff.

That aside though, it sounds by now that the pad is pretty screwed anyway, so time to clean and use AS5.

 

[slvr_phoenix]

One last quick question, is there any product out ther that allows you to power multiple fans ina system besides the MB, my mother board only has two pan slots, one for the cpu and one for the system.

Yes, the molex connectors from your power supply can power fans too. When you buy a fan and you need to run it from the power supply instead of the motherboard, make sure to get a fan with a 4-pin molex connector instead of a 3-pin motherboard connector. (A lot of good fans these days come with adaptors and/or split cables so that you can do either.) And if you need more molex connectors from your power supply, then just get y-splitters.