Technology Forum

I built a computer that runs WINXP 64 pro for my woodworking shop about a year ago. Has been running fine until the other day it rebooted twice. I live in Texas and summer tempertures of 98-99 F are already here. The machine is in an office next to the shop and saw dust blows in and I have not been running the AC yet. The room temp gets up to about 85- 86 degrees lately. I have been reading other posts on this site with "Hot CPU issues" and so far I have done the following (1) Completely cleaned out the PC cabinet of dust (2) Changed the system fan to a Tricool that plugs into the motherboard (MSI P965 Neo with Core 2 6400 running at 2.1 Gh) (3) added a tricool 80 mm fan to the front to increase air flow. (3) Downloaded and installed Fanspeed to monitor temp and speed. After making these changes the CPU temp without significant load is running 47-50C. One concern I have is that when I run AVG virus scans the temperature increases up to about 77C. Before I made the changes it would rise to 80C with the AVG scan running. The CPU Usage gets up to 100% in FANspeed when the temperature spikes. When I first built the computer, I followed Intels directions for installing the heat sink and fan to the CPU. It did not say to use thermal compound. I was concerned about this but followed the directions. Is there anything else I should do. I see from the site that the top temperature for this CPU should be about 60.1 C. Another problem is that the fan speed for the front fan conected to NB-Fan1 shows 0 speed in Fanspeed. When I run Fan speed and the utility that came with the MOBO "CoreCenter" several time all fan speed indications drop to zero and the alarm sounds. Looking in the case all fans are in fact running. One more tidbit. The CPU package was labeled Core 2 6400 but FanSpeed and other software call the machine a 6600. I may have set this machine to run faster than it should. Any sugestions?