Hi there, Here's what happened. I built my latest system, however I had some less-than-experience friends help my do it. The system is a P4 3ghz on an AOpen mainboard. I've been using the system for three months and I've always noticed my cpu fan had been quite noisy and also not giving me the performance it should, but for some reason it never worried me. So the other day I tweaking some stuff in my CMOS, and natural mess a setting up and find that it won't boot and is giving my the classic long BIOS beeps. So I unplug the tower, and grab the case and notice to my dismay it's pretty darn warm, hot even. I naturally panic. I open up the case thinking there was a flash or something, but there wasn't. So I reset the breakers for CMOS and go about my merry way. Twenty minutes later, I restart and go into the CMOS again, but decide to take a look at my temperature stuff before that. I'm SHOCKED to find that my CPU alarm is disabled, my fan is running at maxspeed, and the CPU temperature reads 98 degress celcius. So I shut down the system immediately and open the case. It turns out one of the guys who helped me build the system accidently stuck on of the wires on the heatsink for CPU BETWEEN the CPU and the sink. The off course prevented a seal forming. I realized that I've been running the CPU at 100 degress or so for 3 months. What I wanna know is... how badly could my CPU be damaged, how badly has it's life been shortened, and wil lthe damage show up reduced performance or will it just fail one day?
It's not very likely it's been damaged at all. Intel CPU's have excellent thermal protection for their processors, so when the CPU gets too hot, it throttles it's speed down (sometimes dramatically) to protect itself. Just make sure you reseat the heatsink properly with a fresh application of thermal grease and you'll be alright
Hopefully it wasn't damaged, but the only way to make sure is by running some strenuous benchmarks on it. First make sure you have a thin layer of some kind of thermal interface material between your CPU and heatsync, such as Arctic Silver 5. Next download and run a CPU burn-in tool such as TestCPU or MetaBench. Run 'em and see if 1) the machine crashes 2) its performance is up to par with other CPUs in its class.
Well, thanks for your help guys, but I have one more question. The specs on the system are as follows. Pentium 4 @ 3.2 Ghz 1 Gig of PC3200 DDR RAM 7200 RPM SATA HD RADEON X800 Pro What kind of PCMark of 3DMark score should I be looking for?
Compare your results to others with similar systems online. If there is a huge disparity, or if your system crashes during the benchmarks, you might have a problem.
I don't know about PCMark05 but for 3DMark05, your looking at about 5000 give or take. Also, remember that ALL systems vary in benchmarks, especially in 3DMark tests, so take the results with a grain of salt.
Bit of an update. I finally got around to getting some artic silver and surface purifier. I put the heatsink on, but now the computer won't start up properly. After I cleaned the CPU and put it back, I was closing the latch and it made a loud crack. I think this either damaged the CPU or the mainboard. How can I tell which and is there ANY chance this is covered under Intel's warranty.
Hmm, CPUs use something called a ZIF socket. The ZIF stands for 'zero insertion force'; that means the weight of the CPU itself should have been enough to settle the CPU into the socket, and lowering the tensile arm should have caused the socket to gently grip the CPU's pins. Either you forced the CPU in a direction contrary to its pinout, or else the ZIF socket is broken.
