PC issues

[Imakeholesinu]

Ok, here is something odd.

About 3 weeks ago my PC powered itself off while I was messing around underneath my desk. Attempted to power it back up and it went really...ass...slow. It showed me the ABIT screen which it never did before, and a couple of other odd things started happening. Needless to say I thought I fried the motherboard.

I ordered a new one off newegg from ASUS. Went to dallas, came back from dallas, put it all together and attempted boot. I got a post screen with just CPU, Memory, Videocard on. Went and put my HD's into the case and everything. Powered it on, no post. No video. No beeps. Shit.

So I resurrected the P4C I have on an old HP mainboard to get me by so I could at the very least stream music and such.

Took the newer PC to work today and showed it to the hardware guru here. We tried the Video card and the memory in his PC just to rule out those components. Everything worked fine except we couldn't test the CPU or Motherboard. I start an RMA process through newegg for the board thinking it is blown.

I go back to my apartment to pick up the box and decide I'll bring along the other motherboard. I replace the replacement board with the old board and for shits and giggles I try and power it up. IT BOOTED!!! got into the BIOS and everything!

Only issue is the CPU runs SUPER FUCKING HOT! not sure why.

[Imakeholesinu]

Ok,

Had the heat sink on wrong. placed it the correct direction, CPU is running at a cool 33C now. Going to just let it go for now.

[Kupek]

Ok,

Had the heat sink on wrong. placed it the correct direction, CPU is running at a cool 33C now. Going to just let it go for now.

That's exactly what I was going to tell you to check for.

Back at my old school, the guys who administered our systems had a server that was running ridiculously slow. It had DVFS, and it was always on the slowest setting. This was not acceptable, since the whole point of the server was to run people's computationally intensive tasks.

After many rounds on the phone with Dell, where Dell assumed the problem was the with the admins, they finally discovered that Dell had put a sticker on the CPU, and it was inbetween the CPU and the heat sink. You need thermal contact between the CPU and heat sink for it to actually work. D'oh.

[SineSwiper]

After many rounds on the phone with Dell, where Dell assumed the problem was the with the admins, they finally discovered that Dell had put a sticker on the CPU, and it was inbetween the CPU and the heat sink. You need thermal contact between the CPU and heat sink for it to actually work. D'oh.

Surprised that the sticker didn't just melt off.

[Imakeholesinu]

Just put the whole PC back together and re-activated windows. Runs like a dream now. I have three working PC's now.

One is a dual core
One is a P4
One is a P3