CPU overheating

hugheskevi

Would appreciate any thoughts anyone has about what is wrong with my PC.

The PC is an Intel Core i5-2500K, and was overclocked when I purchased it by the shop which built it. It had an nVidea 560 Ti Graphics card, 8gb RAM. It is a bit over 3 years old and has got through a lot of operating hours in that time (I'd guess around 20,000).It runs Windows 7.

Last week the graphics card failed, but removing the graphics card and using on-board graphics had the PC working fine. Last night the PC ran under normal use for about 6 hours, without any sign of any issue. It was then shut-down, again without any sign of issue.

This morning it failed to boot (having been shut down for about 7 hours), reporting CPU over-heating very soon after starting (ie within a minute), at about 88 degrees. Failures ranged from shutting down after about 3 seconds to about 90 seconds before it shut down from powering up.

This evening I have made no changes aside from taking the case side off before starting. The PC had been powered down for about 12 hours between this morning and this evening. The PC now appears to be running fine, with the 4 cores operating at a constant temperature of around 40 degrees. All fans are operating normally and have been throughout.

I'm struggling to understand what caused the reported overheating this morning, and whether it actually was running at those temperatures, or what was making the PC think it was at those temperatures. Appreciate any ideas, thanks in advance.

GunJack

first off, give it a damn good cleaning out, including a soft small paintbrush inbetween the cooling fins on the heatsink, and all the fans. Do the case and CPU fans still work? I'd do the same with the gfx card, it may be that after 3 years running the whole thing just needs some tcc (that's tender cleaning care )

Orangezorki

If everything that GunJack has suggested doesn't work, and you get more overheating, I'd replace the thermal paste on the CPU. It can often dry out and stop transferring the heat to the cooler.

Having said that, if its working fine, it might be just a loose connector. Might be worth grounding yourself and making sure all plugs are securely in.

Kendall80

If the above mentioned cleaning and re-application of thermal paste do not work you could always take off or reduce the overclock.


The chip is likely under higher load now the 560 Ti isn't there so the overclock may be unstable anyway. It'd be worth going back to stock multiplier/voltage then re-overclocking imo That's what I do after any significant system changes.

cookie365

If the temp is fine now that suggests nothing wrong with the thermal paste.

My first hunch would be a failing CPU heatsink fan. Depending on your cooler they're either simple, straightforward, tricky, difficult, insanely difficult, or impossible to replace

hugheskevi

Thanks for the replies, I tried a variety of the things suggested and the problem appears to have been fixed.

Although I can't be certain, I think the issue was to do with the overclock - I removed it, and since then the system has been fine.

Strider590

I'd look at resetting the bios, sometimes a crash can corrupt the bios and alter the overclocking.

If it was overclocked from new, then there will be a config saved as a backup for that in the BIOS somewhere.