Arch Linux

sweiss

Member

Registered: 2004-02-16

Posts: 635

Weird Hardware Issues - Need Your Advice

Hello.
I'm having this weird issue lately, and I was wondering if anyone can help.

First, I have a Pentium 4 3.2Ghz HT Presscot CPU, 512 MB RAM and an nVidia GeForce FX5200.

The problem:
I often leave my machine on overnight. When I wake up and get to the machine, I can see that X is using 50% CPU. When I move the mouse, I can see that it reacts very slowly to mouse-over effects. Then when I click a window, or try to access the keyboard, X pretty much freezes, and it loses touch with both the mouse and the keyboard. The only resort is to press the Reset button.
When I do so, my machine does not really reset - It gets stuck even before the BIOS screen comes up.
What I do then is I need to shutdown the computer, wait for a few minutes and turn it back on. When I turn it back on and it actually start working, I get a message from my BIOS, stating that some "overclocking failed". It then asks me to either load the default BIOS settings or to reconfigure the BIOS myself. When I choose the load the default settings, it carries on to GRUB and it's all good.

The cause (what I think, that is):
I think the cause for this is the CPU. My CPU runs at very high temperatures, for some reason. Now my computer is idle, and according to lm_sensors it runs at 68C now. When I came to the machine this morning, lm_sensors showed it was running at 81C.

The thing is I am pretty clueless as far as hardware is concerned. Can that be the reason for it all? What causes X to suddenly go berzerk with its CPU usage?

Any ideas and suggestions would be welcome, as I am pretty clueless.

Thanks a lot for reading

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Some PKGBUILDs: http://members.lycos.co.uk/sweiss3

rayjgu3

Member

From: Chicago IL usa

Registered: 2004-07-04

Posts: 695

Re: Weird Hardware Issues - Need Your Advice

run "ps aux" command will tell you everything that is running

also
open the case make sure all fans are spinning
clean all dust & pet hair if you have a pet
i dont have a pet but i do clean the inside of my box like once a year or more
remove fan housing from heatsink on processor clean all dust between fins
if you dont have one or do consider putting another case fan in there
at one end machine blowing out the other end blowing in to circulate frsh air into box
does your pc sit inside a cabinet? maybe a wood desk cabinet, wood absorbs heat
while the inside of your pc circultes air if inside a cabinet with the same air trapped inside
the pc is only circulating the same air this is only one possibility for your issues but its the 1st place id look
for heat issues

& from what your telling me
81 degree Celsius = 177.8 degree Fahrenheit
i think 212 degrees is boiling , you could damn near cook your meals in a machine that hot
i leave my pc on almost always i have not turned it off in some time & im running
30 degree Celsius = 86 degree Fahrenheit

iphitus

Forum Fellow

From: Melbourne, Australia

Registered: 2004-10-09

Posts: 4,927

Re: Weird Hardware Issues - Need Your Advice

81 degrees is definitely too hot. Get that fixed up before anything else. Not enough to damage as they shut off, or lock up before that stage, but easily enough to make the system unstable.

James

sweiss

Member

Registered: 2004-02-16

Posts: 635

Re: Weird Hardware Issues - Need Your Advice

Well, I opened the case and cleaned the fans and heatsink like mad. The CPU is now at 48-55C when idle, it reaches about 71C at full load.

Correct me if I'm wrong, but it's still too hot. Could it be that the thermal paste wore off or something like that?

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Some PKGBUILDs: http://members.lycos.co.uk/sweiss3

samoturk

Member

From: Ljubljana, Slovenia

Registered: 2007-02-12

Posts: 86

Re: Weird Hardware Issues - Need Your Advice

You have a pentium 4 prescot processor which are known to overheat. Some even call them PresHot.

oli

Member

From: 127.0.0.1

Registered: 2006-02-07

Posts: 164

Website

Re: Weird Hardware Issues - Need Your Advice

Most of the info out there in the net about Prescotts is crap. At full load it should be about 65°C, but if it's too hot, every modern Intel CPU will shutdown itself, so nothing to worry about. Think about some extra fans in the case.

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Use UNIX or die.

sweiss

Member

Registered: 2004-02-16

Posts: 635

Re: Weird Hardware Issues - Need Your Advice

Well, I guess it wasn't the CPU temperature after all.
After I've cleaned out the heatsink, I still arrived home today and Xorg was unusable at 100% cpu load.

Must be a weird Xorg bug after all.

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Some PKGBUILDs: http://members.lycos.co.uk/sweiss3