A family member of mine asked me to upgrade their system for them...
Upon taking it home, I discovered it has a GA 7N400-L mainboard, and it
really appears to have temperature sensor problems causing all the fans
to run at max, all the time.

From being off all night, to booting into BIOS, it reports a CPU temp
of 60C. Letting it run in BIOS it gets up to about 67C... this is with
the case wide open and an ambient temperature of around 18C. Removing
the CPU fan and touching the heat sync, its only warm, certainly not 67C.

I've read that the the GA series is known for reporting temps about 5C
high, but this is ridiculous!

Any suggestions?

On 5/9/2009 10:43 PM, Bill wrote:

> What happens when you clean out the cpu heatsink and apply some fresh
> heatsink grease?

I had already cleaned the heatsink and the blades of the CPU fan, but
didn't think about the grease...

Picked up a tube of Arctic Silver 5, and applied it to the CPU and
(and the NVIDA gpu, for good measure)...

At idle on the Windows Desktop, I'm now getting ~50C for the CPU and
~54C for the GPU. Not quite enough to get the fans to spin down, but
certainly healthier temps, although I think idle 50C is still high for
an Athalon 3200.

Thanks for the suggestion, Bill.

Ryan P. wrote:
> On 5/9/2009 10:43 PM, Bill wrote:
>
>> What happens when you clean out the cpu heatsink and apply some fresh
>> heatsink grease?
>
> I had already cleaned the heatsink and the blades of the CPU fan, but
> didn't think about the grease...
>
> Picked up a tube of Arctic Silver 5, and applied it to the CPU and (and
> the NVIDA gpu, for good measure)...
>
> At idle on the Windows Desktop, I'm now getting ~50C for the CPU and
> ~54C for the GPU. Not quite enough to get the fans to spin down, but
> certainly healthier temps, although I think idle 50C is still high for
> an Athalon 3200.
>
> Thanks for the suggestion, Bill.

As you stated in your first post, the sensor on that motherboard series
does run too high. Several years ago when I was running a 3200+ at 100%
load on a 7N400-L, it was getting up into the upper 60s C with the stock
heatsink/fan. I put a much better one on it and it ended up running in
the upper 50s C. Still hot, but it's a hot processor and an odd sensor.

George

On 5/11/2009 11:39 PM, gdp wrote:

> As you stated in your first post, the sensor on that motherboard series
> does run too high. Several years ago when I was running a 3200+ at 100%
> load on a 7N400-L, it was getting up into the upper 60s C with the stock
> heatsink/fan. I put a much better one on it and it ended up running in
> the upper 50s C. Still hot, but it's a hot processor and an odd sensor.

I don't think he'll need to worry about running at 100% too incredibly
often. At load, it seems to hover around ~63C now... before the Arctic
Silver, it got up to ~77C. If I can find a better heatsink/fan for
cheap, I'll throw it on there. Maybe I'll be able to quiet the system
down. The CPU fan constantly runs at a 4600RPM at idle, and get up to
5200 at load.

In getting the most bang for the buck, I played with overclocking. I
got up to 211 FSB before it got unstable. I'd play with the memory
timings to get more out of it, but with the age of the board, I'm
hesitant to ask too much of the board!

It runs Warcraft perfectly smoothly now, which is all he wanted, so
maybe I'll just quit while I'm ahead!