"Engineering is the art of making what you need out of things you can get..."

[Alex Nikitin]

Had a bit of a disaster today with one of my workhorse computers, a very old (for a computer, that is) Compaq Presario, serving as the main measuring station, connected to a lot of various bits of measuring equipment with GPIB. This machine is used for measuring my test cassettes, metrology stuff and some work stuff as well.

Anyway, it started to overheat, even a smallest operation was sending the processor fan to the max rev, quite noisy and very disturbing, as usually this kind of symptom means a potentially serious trouble if left unattended. OK, I thought, this is most likely the usual disease of old comps, a processor heatsink gets clogged with dust, nothing that a can of compressed air won't cure. Took the comp out, open the cover, sure enough, plenty of dust. Removed the heatsink with fun , only to discover, to my horror and disbelieve, that the plastic frame holding the heatsink is broken into three bits and the heatsink was barely touching the surface of the processor. What to do?! I need this comp operational, was hoping for a downtime of an hour at most.

One of my favourite quotations is "Engineering is the art of making what you need out of things you can get". I quickly realised that just gluing the plastic bits together won't work well (especially if done in a hurry). I've glued the frame anyway and looked around the lab to find something to reinforce it. The results are on the photos. The metal bits cut from some scrap stainless steel plates with suitable size holes, plus four M2.5 screws to replace plastic inserts and now this frame may (hopefully) hold for a while!

 

Cheers

Alex

[badtrace]

Ah yes, socket 478 intel? i've used zip ties over the heatsink and through the board before, worked a treat.

[wizard69]

Nice patch!   

That being said I hope you have near term plans to replace that PC.    This especially if one hour of downtime will be a problem.

By the way on our production floor we have started to use a lot of small form factor machine where and expansion bus isn't needed.    Generally performance is good enough and the space saved can be significant over a tower.   Of course this means that USB will be reliable enough for you.

[derree]

Hello Alex,

If it breaks again, there are still retention kits for LGA478 available, which costs about 3 to 10 Euros.

Btw, looks like a fairly high amount of thermal paste, a much smaller amount  should result in overall lower cpu temps.

[m3vuv]

its a funnything,had a dell inspiron once with a 2.5ghz cpu,kept shutting down saying the cpu was overheating,found out there was a pad under the cpu located on the bottom case,had a place for amd and intel,found it was in the wrong place,so corrected it replaced the heatsink compound and cleaned the fan,but it made no difference,so brought a new cpu and it fixed it,a few months later had another inspiron 1720 with the 1.8ghz cpu so thought i would try the cpu that i removed from the 1st machine in it,low and behold it worked fine,work that one out!!!

[james_s]

High core voltage would be my guess. Maybe incorrect setting, maybe a dirty pin, hard to say for sure.