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Shuttles Crashing

Over the past couple of months, both of my Shuttle computers started randomly crashing. The AMD Shuttle started to go first. However, when it crashed, there was a little red light glowing from the interior. Red = heat? Sure enough, after further diagnosis, it was overheating when it required any amount of processing power over time. So, I trashed-talked my AMD giving the whole Intel is better spill to myself.

Beginning this weekend, my Intel Shuttle started locking up at random. This time, with no processing going on. I couldn’t figure it out until I opened up the BIOS and discovered that sitting idle, the processor was running at 104°C. Holy crap! I knew it had to be high, but how high? Certainly over the boiling point of water. So, I asked the Google calculator. 104 degrees Celsius = 219.2 degrees Fahrenheit

No farking wonder the thing was locking up! Now, other than keeping the case open and a 10″ personal fan blowing on it constantly, I need to come up with a way to keep both of these things from starting a China Syndrome.

By: PhragMunkee | 2006/04/02 | Geek Stuff | Trackback | Comments [RSS 2.0]

2 Responses to Shuttles Crashing


Comments

  1. Jeffrey
    Comment by Jeffrey | 2006/04/03 at 00:57:05

    I’ve found on hot-running machines (mostly AMD) that I need to re-grease the chip/heatsink every 6 months or so - the original thermal pads on the sinks wear out (I guess because of the heat itself?!?) Plus when you have the sink out, run a vacuum on it. Like a shop vac is best if you’re serious about getting the dust out. The AMD chips have spacers that keep the sink at the right distance from the chip, but that means if you don’t have a transfer pad or grease, all that heat stays on the chip itself and you start crapping out.

    I did have my machine running open with a fan blowing on it for about a year, and every time I thought “this is stupid” and turned the fan off, it rebooted within a few hours, no kidding. Eventually it turned out that I had a bad memory chip that itself must have been kind of heat sensitive - with that fixed I’ve had my case actually closed for a bit.

    I think there’s a certain karma associated with running computers with the cases open. I think as soon as you screw everything down, put in all your board spacers and shut the case the ‘puter thinks that you’re going to ignore it, so it has to act up to get you to pay attention again. You leave it open and the ghost in the machine assumes that at any minute you’ll be pulling out the vacuum and thermal grease…

  2. Garrett
    Comment by Garrett | 2006/04/03 at 02:54:35

    I’m sure it’s probably time to do some spring cleaning inside the cases, but I haven’t really had the motivation for it. I need to go ahead and buy some of the really fancy thermal grease and probably get a shim for my AMD as well.

    If I had to guess as to why the they started running a lot hotter, it’s because I used to run processor-intensive apps nearly 24/7 and then just stopped. With the AMD, I was encoding video for a while and then stopped. Within a week or so of stopping, it started overheating. For the Intel, I was encoding and running SETI@Home. Then, I reformatted and haven’t run anything on it for a week and now it’s acting up. Those are the only two coincidences that I can think of that may be linked to this.

    And I’m glad someone else believes that computers are inhabited by paranormal spirits. In the case of overheating, I’d have to believe that mine are possessed by demons (and not the cute FreeBSD daemon). When you apply thermal grease, it’s like sprinkling holy water and casting out the demons. It makes for a good story anyways…


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