over heating ecs???

[sbob420]

i have an ecs k7s5a mb and i have been having some probs with it latley. the computer freezes randomly. i ran mem test on the memory and it came back with no errors. the problem started out when i was playing games the computer froze randomly. i thought my vid card was over heating and had a box fan blowing into the comp. now my computer crashes when i am simply encoding a movie or listining to tunes. i have just done a fresh install so i have ruled out alsomst any software issue. i have touched the heat sinck on my cpu (thermal take silent boost with a amd 1800+ cpu.) and it is cool . i have tried the heat sink on my vid card ( powerolor 9600pro 256mb ram.) and it is cool the only thing i can find that the herat sink gets hot is on the mb (circled in the attached pic.) it feels warm to the touch. this problem has been getting worse and worse the box fan will not even help much lately. i have a few questions.

1. could the chip circled on the mb overheating??
if so what would be aceptable temps and is there a program to monitor them?

2 if it is oveheating can i get a cooling system for it???

3. if thats not the problem then any suggestions would help iam about willing to try anything.

[Peter M]

If the CPU heatsink is cool, this might mean that it makes poor contact to the CPU, and the CPU is actually red hot underneath the cool heatsink. You might want to check that.

Often enough, random crashes also point to a low quality or dying power supply unit. K7S5A is particularly sensitive to poor power quality.

[sbob420]

that was the other thing i was worred about my psu is 300wt and after adding everything up i am taking about 270 is that acceptable or tooo close,


sorry i fgorgot to add that the cpu fan is warm to the touch but te other is almost dowright hot

[sm8000]

You're saying the heatsink is hot?

What brand name is that PSU?

[Peter M]

Originally posted by sbob420
that was the other thing i was worred about my psu is 300wt and after adding everything up i am taking about 270 is that acceptable or tooo close,


sorry i fgorgot to add that the cpu fan is warm to the touch but te other is almost dowright hot

Well if the chipset heatsink is hot it's doing its job.

Regarding the power supply, the large "300W" sticker doesn't say anything. Read the fine print. What is the sustained load on the individual rails? 3.3V and 5V rails are of particular importance - usually there's a "combined max load" limitation on those.

I've seen "300W" power supplies that couldn't actually sustain more than 190W.

[sbob420]

is their a program to monitor the power comming out so i could see if that the problem???

[rmanet]

Peter's right - best guess is it's your PSU if it happened after you put in a new video card (they're power hogs) - a generic 300w (if you say you're using 270) won't last and is probably your problem - try a new one and make it a brand name or you'll be dealing with the same problem in a few months.....

[sbob420]

cool i will give it a try thanks for the help.