[Cyrious]

I have in my possession a Phenom II x4 system that i bought off craigslist. When I got it, i couldn't help but notice that the heatsink on it was almost pathetically small for it, being more along the lines of something that would be used for an Athlon II x2 or a Sempron, not a 125W Phenom II 920. On top of that, the chipset heatsink is also quite small, and it gets very hot even at idle (60C easily). I swapped the extruded piece of crap heatsink out for a Scythe Shuriken Rev B, and even in this repurposed HP SFF case, it lowered all temps by a good 3-5C (with the silence being a big plus).

Now, I left the machine on overnight last night, and when I got to it today i found that it had soft-locked, with the only hint being what went wrong was some minor artifacting and flickering around the cursor.

That leads me to my question: Is it possible that, while in the previous owner's hands, the extended periods of high temperatures due to inadequate cooling have cause permanent damage to either the CPU or the chipset? I know Phenom IIs are fairly sensitive to high temperatures, and I have no doubt the CPU slid past 62C more than once, but the bigger question lies with the board.

Thoughts?

Edit: before you ask, yes the system is at stock. I dont trust 3 phases to handle a 125W chip at anything more than stock anyways.

 

[spinFX]

Was the computer doing anything? If the temps were fine when you went to bed, and you weren't doing any heavy processing over night, it would have just been idling all night, shouldn't have goten hot.

Maybe the lock came from something else? Any other overclocks applied (you mentioned no cpu overclock)? Hard drive on the way out?
Can you give a run down on the system?

 

[Cyrious]

Quote:

Originally Posted by spinFX

Was the computer doing anything? If the temps were fine when you went to bed, and you weren't doing any heavy processing over night, it would have just been idling all night, shouldn't have goten hot.

Maybe the lock came from something else? Any other overclocks applied (you mentioned no cpu overclock)? Hard drive on the way out?
Can you give a run down on the system?

Computer was idling the entire night. Only things that were really running were Open Hardware Monitor and Catalyst control center for the iGPU.

The system is running entirely stock. iGPU is stock, CPU is stock, DRAM (other than voltage, I'll get to that in a minute) is stock, and the drive is fully functional.

System is as follows:
Phenom II 920 2.8ghz
Biostar A780L AM2+ motherboard
2x2GB ADATA DDR2-800
80GB Western Digital IDE drive

Now, about the Dram voltage. I noticed that in bios, the lowest ram voltage it would allow is 1.95v. I began to wonder if either the voltage or the heat it was resulting in had damaged the ram, so I swapped with a 2x1 set of Corsair DDR2-800, and it passed every test I threw at it. Swapping back to the Adata set resulted in the system hard-resetting during a memtest86 run. So, new point to look at: One or both of the 2GB DIMMs may be bad. I'm messing around with the ram right now to see how this goes.

 

[Cyrious]

Hmmm, the set failed at 800mhz 5-5-5-18, but it passed at 667mhz 5-5-5-18. Degraded set? or simply a mislabeled one?

 

[Cyrious]

Huh, turns out it was the ram. The system managed to stay running all night and it cleared OCCT Linpack where at 800mhz it failed before. I don't think its the IMC, as i put in an 800mhz 2x1GB set (the corsair sticks) before and it ran at 800mhz flawlessly.