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Would this fry my cpu?
I recently had my computer shipped from the US to Japan. I set it up and plugged it in. I got a message about my cput temp. I went into bios and my cpu was extremely hot. I shutdown the computer and opened it up. Apparently the heatsink has become loose. Does this mean my cpu is fried when i turned my computer on or will it be ok once i put the heatsink back on?
Comments
i would suggest you do 4 things.
1) unplug the system from any and all power sources.
2) go out and get your self some thermal greese (most computer/electronic stores have it)
3) take the heatsink off completely (demagitize your self naturally beforehand) and clean all the thermal greese off the cpu and the sink and apply brand new greese
4) reattach the heatsink (make sure its 100% secure this time) and hope for the best.
if the computer post boots and everything you are ok. if it does not post or boot chances are the cpu cooked.
the reason for cleaning the greese is to make sure there is no dust or dirt on the cpu/sink from it coming loose.
Most CPUs have an auto shutdown which will turn them off if they get hot enough to cause damage. You might be ok.
The fact that it was still running and you could look at temps in the BIOS might be a good sign. What temps did you see?
All you can do is clean things up, re-apply some thermal grease, and seat the heatsink properly...and then fire it up and see if it works. If you start seeing instability or crashes, it probably took some damage from overheating.
assuming you have a LARGE aftermarket heatsink, you may want to take a good look around the board to make sure the heatsink didnt do any additional damage.
I would take your heatsink off, examine all the parts around the cpu, heatsink assembly including the mounting kit to make sure nothing is bent (screws, mounting plate, heatpipes etc) then remove the CPU and examine the heatspreader on the cpu to make sure there is no damage to the cpu itself.
if everything looks good, reseat the cpu and reapply thermal compound before putting the heatsink back onto the board.
as meantioned by Fozzik, modern cpu has built in thermal protection. however, that wouldnt protect it from any physical damage that may have been caused by the heatsink shifting.
Cool, thanks i have to jump on this fast so if there is anything wrong i can contact the shipping company and get insurance. At the time i think my cpu was shooting around 97 c. The heatsink was not totally off, 2 screws came loose out of the 4 holding it in place.
did the 2 screws come LOOSE? or OFF? if the screws came OFF, they may have caused some kind of short circuit.
97C is very hot depending on what kind of chip it is. for example, thermal limit of a sandybridge i5 is only around 73C. if there isnt any damage or short, then the chip "should" still be good cuz the thermal protection should have kicked in. but as i mentioned before, there "may" be other problems if the case was dropped enough to shift the heatsink.
97C is really hot, but not so hot that you can say for sure that it definitely damaged the CPU. Keep in mind that when your components are being assembled, they see over 200C for a short time (in a lead-free process) and are rated to handle it under controlled conditions. You certainly wouldn't want to do that every day...but it means your CPU might be ok even at the temps you saw.
The fact that your CPU didn't shut down automatically at that temperature is a little strange. If you can get the system back up and running, you may want to check in the BIOS and see if there's a setting for thermal emergency shutdown - make sure it's set to a reasonable temperature, like 80C, and turned on.
Also, on the thermal paste, usually less is more. It all depends on the heatsink/cpu though. Look up directions on how to apply thermal paste for your specific CPU/Heatsink(if custom) to make sure you apply it correctly with the right amount.
Don't you have a guarantee or something. When I was living in Brazil my computer was shipped to San Paulo from the States and you could get them to come and change things and if anything was wrong they would fix it. After two years my hard drive died ,they came and replaced it from Dell for free of charge. I suggest you look at your contract before you do something that violates its terms.
This is a home built pc. not sure if fedex would cover costs. It was running perfectly fine for a month prior to shipment. Witch 2 ran without any problem
97 C for five minutes shouldn't kill the processor at stock speeds. 97 C for a year might. Try getting some thermal paste and reseating the heatsink properly, and then turn the computer on. If it works, it's probably fine. For that matter, if you were able to shut the computer down properly when you got the warning that the CPU was too hot, then it's probably fine. Maybe you put a week's worth of wear and tear on it very quickly, but silicon is pretty resilient.
Intel and AMD are aware that occasionally something goes wrong and a heatsink doesn't stay on. They do try to prevent their processors from immediately dying in those cases. One thing that helps is that the processor comes with an integrated heatspreader. The processor itself might seem very small when you hold it in your hands, but most of what you're holding is an aluminum heatspreader. I'm not sure how much heat the heatspreader can safely dissipate by itself, but a few watts wouldn't surprise me if you've got decent general case airflow.
If you got an Intel Sandy Bridge processor, then it will have power gating to shut down cores, which brings the idle power consumption down to a few watts. Processors are usually idle unless you're playing games or something like that. That will make it take a while to overheat. A Phenom II processor doesn't have power gating, but it will have idle power consumption of only 10 W or so.
Finally, processors can measure their own temperature. If they detect overheating, they will cut back clock speeds severely to try to avoid frying. That probably happened to you. There is only so much they can do, but this does help.
It probably would have been cheaper to stuff a couple of hard drives full of the programs you like and put them in your suitcase then buy the rest of the box in Japan than to ship a complete PC overseas.