Is 39 Celsius too hot?

About the past month or so, my computer has randomly been locking up, more so when I have the side of the case on.

I'm running Speedfan right now, and CPU Burn-in to stress-test, and its sitting between 38-40 celsius.

I've cleaned out the case (fair amount of dust), removed the fans, cleaned those, added another fan for circulation, reapplied thermal paste, and leave the side open. Still freezes up. I've switched hard drives, video, memory, and so on.

Could it be possible that it is still an overheating problem? As far as I can tell the heatsink is on correctly, it sits on the chip and clamps down, with the paste in between. Maybe I used too much, or something?

39* C for a CPU is actually pretty good for an older chip and about what newer chips would hit with normal cooling solutions. How are the GPU temps? Does your BIOS or monitoring software happen to show case ambient temps?



You only want a very small layer of thermal paste. The idea is to bridge the small gap (and fill in the imperfections) between the HSF and the processor itself. Here is a pretty solid explanation as well just in case I suck at describing things.



Have you actually run Memtest on the original memory (or the memory you've swapped in)? It's unlikely, but there's always the chance that you swapped bad memory with bad memory.

You're left with about three things to really look at for lockups: device drivers, power supply, motherboard.

Depends on the CPU I suppose, but I don't think 39c / 102f is too hot, especially under those conditions. I will say that leaving the case open is usually a bad idea, because it completely stops proper airflow.

What sort of thermal paste? I use Arctic Silver and have had good results. Note that any more than a bead that smooths out to cover the CPU with a fine coating where the heatsink makes contact is detrimental.

Have you examined your mainboard at all? Any "popped caps" (electrolytic capacitors that fail can "pop the top" and sometimes actually ooze out). Some manf. use cheap caps that have a very thin margin of failure, and they can cause problems like this.

Did you try different RAM or at least pop your RAM out and make sure it reseats properly?

Have you completely ruled out a software issue? Try grabbing a linux live CD and running that to see if it reboots with a completely isolated OS.

I might have put too much paste on. When I took the heatsink off, the old stuff was dry, so I removed that from the cpu and sink, and put some on a little think. Just some generic stuff you can buy at a store..

I've tried different memory configs with different chips, and it still locks.

Motherboard looks good from what I can tell.

Its not the OS. I've installed XP, restored from a working XP Image, did a complete fresh install of Vista, did a fresh install of XP...even tried it as a hackintosh just to see, all of them lockup.

One thing, now that I think about it, is a lot of the time its whenever Firefox loads some flash (whether its youtube, or ads, or anything)...i have uninstalled and reinstalled that though.

Well 39 C is not hot and good enough for the PC... Still I would suggest you to plug in 1 or 2 fan .... it might not be heating problem... try checking with the ram and virtual ram... as we are using older pc but at same time using new software which demands more memory...