Pieter Hulshoff wrote:
Well, it's been completely stable now that the temperature in the room has dropped (nice weather outside, so the door's open:). Below 53C on my CPU/37C on my system I don't experience any crashes. Above that it's likely to crash. Memtest didn't show any problems, but the temperature isn't very high during such tests either. Changing my ramtiming to 266 MHz didn't help though, so I'm pretty sure it's not a RAM problem. Any thoughts?
If you have any reason at all to suspect a problem with excess heating inside the case, then why don't you just get one or two high-throughput fans -- about 50 cuf (1.5 cubic meters) per minute -- and mount it/them on the case, and be done with it? That Lian Li you mentioned sounds like total overkill -- and it probably will cost you several hundred (euros, dollars, or thousand yen :-) ) . Any decent computer case these days should come with two case fan mounts already, and will cost you a lot less. One of those, plus a couple of fans, will save you a bundle. I am not talking about those silly little muffin fans they give you in a power supply and you can buy anywhere for 5 bucks. Those things can't move more than a tiny bit of air (maybe 0.5 cu.m/min if your lucky). If you can't find the fan's throughput printed or stamped on the fan mount, don't buy it (that should be right near the arrow that indicates airflow direction). The fans should be mounted to port air into the case, but make sure you mount a decent air filter in front of each one - otherwise, your case will become a rather large and expensive (and highly inefficient) air filter. No need to get fancy here, you can probably find most of the materials for a decent filter lying around your home -- if necessary, sacrifice a filter for a *good* home air-filtration unit, cut it into small pieces just large enough to cover the intake holes, and tape them to the outside of the case with some electrician's tape. While you're at it, buy/make another filter for the power supply fan intake, particularly if you are a smoker -- fine dust kills electronics nearly as fast as heat, and a power supply makes a much better air filter than a computer case. In a particularly dusty environment, change all the filters every month, otherwise every 3 or 4 months -- but certainly before the dust trapped inside the filter becomes too noticeable, this is expensive stuff you are protecting here. You will of course still need to ensure adequate cooling directly at the CPU. Check, or simply replace, the heat sink material between the CPU chip and the cooling fan. You can get tiny tubes of heatsink material (maybe a cu. cm each?) at any good electronics supply company for a dollar or two for 3 or 4 tubes, which should last almost forever -- half of one should be enough for any CPU. If you have any reason at all to suspect that the CPU fan is even slightly faulty, replace it with one that hopefully moves a higher volume of air. If all this still isn't enough, you need to do something about the room environment. With all the money you just saved not buying the Lian Li case, you can afford a small window-mount air conditioner to keep the temperature and humidity under control :-)