Toasted Athlon

[Radar]

I think I toasted my new Athlon 800.
I did'nt use any case fans, but I have the goo & heatsink/fan combo. It's a shuttle AI61 board. I can't get it to boot each time, and now, the debian install craps out on an interrupt handler message.

I did an internet install of Debian (or at least started to) last night and left it grabbing packages because I was getting bad throughput. When I came in this morning, It had errored because of a connection problem - so I hit enter to continue with dselect - and got a seg fault. After that, the display would not come up after a few attempts, and it would not boot after letting it cool. I took the left panel off, hoping to get some air in there - but after an hour it still had problems.

Wonder If I need to get a new processor. Do Athlon users all have case fans too? Did I mess up?

[ 24 August 2001: Message edited by: Radar ]

[YaRness]

Originally posted by Radar:
<STRONG>I did'nt use any case fans, but I have the goo & heatsink/fan combo.</STRONG>what's a goo?

if you put a fan in a room with the sun shining in the window, and keep the window and doors closed, and turn the fan on, the room won't get any cooler.

[xhadow]

I have case fans, 1 front and 1 rear. I dont think you need those, as long as you dont overclock your CPU

[Radar]

The goo is the heatsink compound. I was told to use that.

[evan223250]

Try running it again, and if it crashes, check the heat (you can probably do this in you're BIOS). If the processor is above 55 degrees celcius, you may have an overheating problem. I would go get a case fan, or move the computer to a cooler part of your home. Chances are you didn't destroy you're processor, since AMD's can stand pretty high heat, but they will work unreliably if they get too hot.

[carlywarly]

Has your BIOS got an overheat alarm? Most have a temperature monitor, and a max allowable temp. If you can get back into the BIOS, see if it's enabled, at least for the future, if the cpu has overheated.

[word]

If the Athlon is "toast" then it won't boot at all.

Go into the BIOS and choose the most conservative "fail safe" settings for CPU and memory. Also check your mobo's website for BIOS upgrades that might correct (or diminish) VIA chipset anomalies.

About the "goo", make sure you didn't apply to much thermal compound. It's only role is to fill any miniscule gaps between the CPU slug and heatsink to maximize the contact area and improve heat transfer.

[Radar]

When I first booted after letting it sit, it was at 77. It creeped up to 95 after a few minutes. I wonder if the case fans would even help at all. Doesn't seem like it should get that hot.

[evan223250]

Is that celcius or farenheit? if it's farenheit that's about where it should be.

[Radar]

95deg F

But it still does not want to boot right. It doesn't turn on the display on power up unless I press reset, then it just sits after probing the pci devices. No boot of hdd, cdrom or floppy.

[SkyNet]

Radar,

The problem could be your RAM. Computers will not boot at all if they do not have RAM in them. On top of that if the RAM is going bad it could cause Segmentation Faults and many other strange anomilies to happen. Programs will not install correctly or if they do they may not run properly.

I've had my RAM go bad on me before and what I've said is just a few things that happens. But all kinds of system failures can come from it.

If I were you, I'd check to see if that was your problem as well. You might want to borrow a stick from a friend unless you have one and see if things change.

Also my Athlon 800 T-bird runs at about 37C when I first boot and 49C after running for a while and at heavy use.

[Radar]

The memory is new, and it passes the mem test on boot up. If all else fails, I can check it by swapping out.

We raped two old pc's for fans & I'll put those in to the case.

[Sweede]

turn it on and touch/hold the heatsink.

if it gets to hot to hold something is wrong (or your just weak)

[wurmy]

aren't amd's known for running on the warm side (meaning you should have a fan even if it didnt come with one)? or have they fixed that with their newest chips? or am i just on crack.....

wurmy

[Molecule Man]

The new palomino core runs cooler, but he probably doesn not have an AthlonMP. Otherwise they typically run at about 35C-43C.

[chimera]

The 1.2GHz Athlon I had ran at up to 150 F. 3 case fans, one CPU fan. That's pretty hot, huh?

[pbharris]

my 1.2 GHz athalon runs at about 55 C (131 F) which i think is pretty hot, the 800 ran at about 48 C (118 F). I was hoping the 1.2 GHz would not be to hat because it has copper interconnects, the 800 had Al interconects. I have one case fan plus the CPU fan.

[Max Powers]

my athlon 1.33 runs at about 48C after playing tribes 2 for a while with a cooler master

[HackWar]

Just buy an intel, I have a Pentium 4 with a standard cooler and it's always 36 Celcius even if I play tribes 2 or quake 3.... AMD is known to have cooling problems ever since they started... Their only advantage above the Pentium is the price.

-------------------------------------------
To frag or not to frag, that's the question
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[carlywarly]

Don't forget, maximum junction temp for semiconductors is actually about 180-190 C, so none of these figures are cause for concern.
I would look carefully at trying a different video card, by the way. If the video BIOS is knackered, the whole machine will refuse to boot. Try and swap it for a basic card that is known to work. I am assuming that the PSU is approved, by the way.
Most benchmarks show Athlons to be more effective per Mhz than Pentiums, for what it's worth.

[Jakie]

Hehe, AMD run reliable in all sorts of pc's you don't need a Intell cpu for that.
Some AMD cpu's do run TOO HOT, namely the first batch of the K6-2 (450) but Durons and Thunderbirds can get quite hot without having problems, which means they are produced with that temperature in mind or at least the capability to perform in those conditions.

What I DO have to add as an afterthought to this discussion is the fact that cpu MHZ rating is rapidly increasing.
So if you JUST upgraded to cpu, well, chances are that the CPU cooler you bought at the time (or perhaps even now at the advice of the seller) isn't up to it.
I've seen numerous cpu coolers advertised as going up to Duron 900, 1ghz, or 1,2ghz etc..
You MIGHT have a cpu cooler that is just not up to your cpu needs in terms of cooling, just as P4 has different requirements to this aspect to say a P3-550 for the Intel freaks here.

A bad or "toasted" cpu WILL NOT boot, if the problems arises after doing some cpu intensive work YES it's a overheating problem in my experience ;)

Hopes this helps.

[ 25 August 2001: Message edited by: Jakie ]

[rdeschene]

Radar. If you have the opportunity to swap out the memory, I recommend you do so to see if that's the problem. I have had new memory, that ran through the POST just fine, but would indeed prevent boot up and/or the computer would run very slowly.

[SkyNet]

Thx you rdeschene,

That's what I've been trying to say. My memory was new also yet it did not function correctly. So there is always that's % out there that does not work correctly.

At least test it to make sure it's not your memory. That's all were asking.

[ 26 August 2001: Message edited by: SkyNet ]

[Radar]

I think it's not the cpu, so I'm going to check the mem & the harddrive for sh*ts & grins.

But here's what keeps happening:
After leaving the pc on all night, & having the deb install crap out on me when I came in, The display will not come up on power on until you press reset. The pc will not boot after the pci scan on power up unless you press reset. Then it will reboot & work.

Debian install craps out now each time you partition the disk and mount root.

Win 2k goes almost to the full install, but craps out with a BSOD and a non-descriptive hardware error.

This mainboard got bad reviews, with people having similar probs. I found this out after buying it.

I guess I have to test each component individually. I'll probably also test the cpu on a different board so I know for sure.

[MBMarduk]

Anyone heard of :cool: Memtest86 (http://www.teresaudio.com/memtest86/) ? :cool: