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I was thinking of purchasing some new upgrades for my pc so i opened up the tower to check out the motherboard and see what was available for me. In the process of this i noticed it was a bit dusty so i decided to clean it a bit. At one point i took off the heatsink and fan and put it back on.
Now my computer won't boot up. the fan starts working but then nothing else happens. the power button on the front won't even turn it off, i need to flip the switch on the power supply.
What I have done? Did i just not put the heatsink and fan back on properly, or have I somehow managed to seriously mess things up?
Posts: 8741 | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
It's very hard to say at this point. One thing to check is the fan headers (if any); you may have put them on backwards. You might also have damaged the CPU when fiddling with the heatsink, or knocked a card loose.
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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edit: there were actually two bent pins. one i fixed fine. the other one has a really tough bend to work out. It's a bit of a double bend and I'm not exactly sure how to go about straightening it out.
(Edit: a pin bent backwards upon itself can sometimes be squeezed straight with some needle-nosed pliers, provided it's an older socket type that actually puts enough space between the pins for that to work.)
Posts: 37449 | Registered: May 1999
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posted
well, i straightened it out as much as possible. it looks like it's sitting right, but still no go on boot up.
Posts: 8741 | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
One thing you should keep in mind is that if you remove the heatsink from the CPU you probably need to replace the thermal interface between them. This is usually a thin layer of a special heat conducting compound (aka thermal grease) or a special sticky "thermal pad".
Depending on how long it takes between starting the power and when the thing fails, it could be a thermal problem (for instance if computer crashes after a minute or two). However, it sounds to me like you've got another problem entirely - the computer won't even POST - and if you have bent pins on the CPU that sounds like a likely culprit. Is everything else reconnected and seated properly?
Posts: 4287 | Registered: Mar 2005
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posted
i didn't actually remove the heatsink from the cpu. the cpu is fused to the heatsink in some manner(it came this way).
Posts: 8741 | Registered: Apr 2001
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posted
I'd guess that it's just stuck on pretty good with thermal compound. It can be pretty hard to pry it off when the CPU is cold. And I hate to say it, but from the sound of it, I'd guess your CPU is toast.
Posts: 9945 | Registered: Sep 2002
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posted
Depending on the builder, they may have used thermal glue instead of just the usual grease. This will make it quite literally impossible to remove the heatsink. Bent CPU pins are bad news. If you can't get it working again by straightening them out, you're pretty much SOL.
Posts: 3003 | Registered: Oct 2004
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posted
yeah, i realized that pretty quick. it was an older processor anyway. I went on newegg and just picked up a new motherboard/cpu combo. Found a good deal on ram as well, so once this all comes in my setup should be significantly more powerful(2.9ghz athlon dual core with 4GBs of RAM). I'm amazed at how cheap memory has gotten. I don't need 4GBs(and my xp can't even use it all), but it's so cheap it just made sense to get it. I'm sure if I eventually upgrade to Vista it'll become necessary.
One of the reasons I had originally opened up the tower was because I recently bought a new flat panel monitor and wanted to set up dual monitors but couldn't with my current graphics card. This new motherboard will be able to handle dual monitors on it's own so I actually saved myself from having to buy a new graphics card.
I took a look and I can get a comparable processor for my old motherboard for about $25(1.6ghz sempron). Between that and the extra tower, hard drives and disc drives I have laying around I can probably create a relatively decent pc which I can either use or sell off.
All in all I could've done worse things to myself. Though I was really kicking myself for most of the day for ever removing that cpu from its socket.
Question, I saw some good deals on quad-core processors, but they'd be useless for me correct? While I do a lot of things on my pc at once, I'm not a gamer and I don't really do any video rendering or encoding. I figure I'm better off getting a faster dual processor assuming I wouldn't be able take advantage of the extra parallel computing power anyway.
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You're probably right, you'll probably never notice much of a benefit from quad core over dual core if you don't do a lot of CPU intensive tasks and don't use applications that are designed for multiple cores. I think there'd be some benefit - there are surely times when you've got 3 or 4 threads competing for resources - but perhaps not enough to matter.
Posts: 4287 | Registered: Mar 2005
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posted
Quad-cores are extremely useful if you do a lot of different things at once (like I do). As time goes on and more multi-threaded software comes out, more cores will be much more useful and necessary.
Also, just upgrading to Vista won't unlock the extra memory for you. The 4GB memory address limitation is specific to 32bit operation. You'll need to upgrade to 64-bit Windows (either XP or Vista will work, but XP-64 kinda sucks).
Posts: 3003 | Registered: Oct 2004
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