Troubleshooting Hardware System Fail

Discussion in 'General Hardware' started by linuxusr, Jul 31, 2016.

  1. linuxusr

    linuxusr Geek Trainee

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    Hi,

    First post, here.

    I've built many computers over the past 15 years, back to mb jumpers and setting IDE slave/master.

    Over the years I've had almost no hardware failures until my system(s) became obsolescent, in which case, it made more sense to invest in the next generation of hardware and to re-build
    rather than to throw money at last generation parts.

    Until now. My new machine, about a year old, is a mini-itx form factor running a Jetway industrial board, a Haswell i3 @ 3.9 GHz, a Noctia low-profile fan with heatsink, 16 GB of DDR3 Mushkin RAM, a 0.5 TB Samsung 850 EVO solid state drive, dual-booted Linux, in a M350 case.

    The crash. Wi-fi drops. Mouse freeze. Reboot to "No operating system." Can access BIOS, so mb is receiving power.

    Open case. Remove fan. The surface of the heat sink has a thick layer of greasy dust and the blades are impregnated. At power start, the fan blade twitches but doesn't run. Turned by hand, the fan does not turn easily; there is resistance.

    History. The two cores of this processor have run at ~85 C (hot), for almost a year, 24/7, doing distributed computing. The M350 case and the Noctia were a great team. Unforunately, I neglected to open the case and blow out the grime.

    My diagnosis is fan and/or processor failure due to overheating. I'm not expecting problems with the RAM or the solid state drive since heat was not an issue. The mb was expensive, $250.00, industrial, and designed for five years; likewise, not a prime suspect.

    But given the temps I was running at I think then when the heatsink began to fail because I did not blow it out, that that killed the processor.

    Here I come to my problem. If I had a range of spare parts I could swap out known good parts and confirm my issue. However, I have no extra parts. If I buy a new part for a suspect part, and I'm wrong, I've just wasted a bunch of money, and now have to "guess" at another part.

    The fan is about $50.00 at newegg. I'll try replacing that first. If a no go, I'll find the cheapest processor for my socket and try that . . . Already, I'm around $125.00 and nothing guaranteed.

    Can you think of a better way to solve my problem? My total parts investment was $850.
     
  2. Wicked Mystic

    Wicked Mystic Big Geek

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    Haswell's suck because thermal paste under CPU heat spreader is comparable to tooth paste. So you need good heatsink to keep CPU cool. That is Intel's "quality".

    As you said, best way is to replace fan (not necessarily heat sink) under it and see if that helps. Nothing is necessarily broken altough overheating may have caused some damage.
     
  3. linuxusr

    linuxusr Geek Trainee

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    Yeah, I'm hoping it's the fan--fifty bucks. I used my own thermal paste, applying it thinly and uniformly. The Haswell is supposed to run cool. In fact, in this unit, when I was not doing distributed computing, where both cores would be at 100%, 24/7, on normal usage, according to htop, my cpu work would fluctuation between 0 and 3% AND my temp would be around 38 C compared to 85 C under full load.
     
  4. Wicked Mystic

    Wicked Mystic Big Geek

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    Fifty bucks for a fan? Link??

    Haswell is not running cool because thermal paste under HS offers very low conductivity. It's done by purpose (so that CPU's/motherboards broke faster).
     
  5. linuxusr

    linuxusr Geek Trainee

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  6. Wicked Mystic

    Wicked Mystic Big Geek

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    38 idle is not very cool, but it's common that temperatures under idle are not very accurate.

    You said you already had Noctua low profile heatsink. So why not just buy fan for it? Fan model should be NF-A9x14.
     
  7. linuxusr

    linuxusr Geek Trainee

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  8. Wicked Mystic

    Wicked Mystic Big Geek

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