- Joined
- Mar 11, 2002
I have never had heat troubles before. Everything has always been well within working temps. Well…I can’t say that anymore.
My main box, a XP 2200+, began acting strange a few weeks ago. After I had been working on it a while, every thing would become choppy. It was like the PC was stuttering on everything it tried to do. The thing that really confused me was that I had not made any changes to it when it started. I just dealt with the problem until I had the time to fool with it this weekend. However, all week I have been racking my brain trying to narrow down what might be causing it.
Tonight I was prepared to try 3 things. First was going to be a reinstall of Windows Xp. I am constantly tweaking it and thought that maybe I had made a change that I forgot about. The second thought was to check for viruses, but I was almost sure that it wasn’t because I just don’t get infected (and no…I do not run an active scanner).
I decided to try the last first. My thermal sensors were telling me things were fine, but I wondered if maybe heat was causing it and I was getting a bad reading. I pulled the filter off my side 80mm fan and replaced it with a plain grill. I then cut a hole in the front in order to ditch the 80mm there and replace it with a 120mm.
After everything was put back together, I pushed the CPU to the max. Five hours and the problem hasn’t come back (before it would only take 30min or less). Seems like the problem was the heat.
But why did it start doing this now even though no changes were made to the PC? Though nothing was changes to the PC itself, there was a change to its environment. I had just added 3 machines over the past couple of weeks and they heated the air in the room. This change in room temperature nearly fried my CPU.
So I guess this shows how bad those stupid vents are the case some manufactures put in front of the fan mounts (or they just drill holes in my case). Cutting those suckers out gives a major boost in cooling performance.
My main box, a XP 2200+, began acting strange a few weeks ago. After I had been working on it a while, every thing would become choppy. It was like the PC was stuttering on everything it tried to do. The thing that really confused me was that I had not made any changes to it when it started. I just dealt with the problem until I had the time to fool with it this weekend. However, all week I have been racking my brain trying to narrow down what might be causing it.
Tonight I was prepared to try 3 things. First was going to be a reinstall of Windows Xp. I am constantly tweaking it and thought that maybe I had made a change that I forgot about. The second thought was to check for viruses, but I was almost sure that it wasn’t because I just don’t get infected (and no…I do not run an active scanner).
I decided to try the last first. My thermal sensors were telling me things were fine, but I wondered if maybe heat was causing it and I was getting a bad reading. I pulled the filter off my side 80mm fan and replaced it with a plain grill. I then cut a hole in the front in order to ditch the 80mm there and replace it with a 120mm.
After everything was put back together, I pushed the CPU to the max. Five hours and the problem hasn’t come back (before it would only take 30min or less). Seems like the problem was the heat.
But why did it start doing this now even though no changes were made to the PC? Though nothing was changes to the PC itself, there was a change to its environment. I had just added 3 machines over the past couple of weeks and they heated the air in the room. This change in room temperature nearly fried my CPU.
So I guess this shows how bad those stupid vents are the case some manufactures put in front of the fan mounts (or they just drill holes in my case). Cutting those suckers out gives a major boost in cooling performance.
