Personally I would make sure the friend uses these
Arctic Silver Incorporated - Arctic Silver 5 < compound and this
Arctic Silver Incorporated - ArctiClean < for the surface preparation a tad expensive but I believe no better cleaning materials than these around - I know folks say alcohol is good enough but in my view it really doesn't clean as thoroughly as this stuff:)
jumanji and ICit2lol hit the nail on the head
I followed your advice and cleaned out my cpu heatsink/ fan which were incredibly filthy to the point where I wasn't sure if there had been a large accumulation of dust or if someone had ripped off part of a sweater and shoved it into my heat sink. It was that clogged...
I took your advice and bought the ArtiClean and Arctic Silver 5 off of Amazon.com for I think around $10 USD altogether which was well worth it. I cleaned out the heat sink and fan, removed old thermal paste, which at that point looked incredibly dry, and then reapplied new thermal paste.
Booted PC and everything is running smoothly now. Downloaded Core Temp to monitor heat levels and nothing is exceeding 30 degrees Celsius
Bravo friends, thank all of you for all of your wisdom and suggestions. This is a great community with great people! Cheers
That's good use that it is running smoothly. I guess you could mark this problem as solved. Wait, you already did.
Well glad you got it sorted Moodus and personally I find always good to check temps from time to time because even Arctic silver compound is not infallible.:)
Another good one is the Noctua NT-H1 but again always check for time to time takes a few seconds and saves a lot of grief. Noctua.at - sound-optimised premium components "Designed in Austria"! a little thicker but the cleaning stuff from Arctic is just the only thing to use in my mind.
Glad to see the solved tick mark on this thread and I had some little part in it.. :)
Sometimes we miss little things and run around in circles but what surprised me was how your knowledgeable friend, who cleaned the video card missed to look at the processor and heat sink.
Anyway all is well that ends well.
^ No doubt.
I think most BIOS do check temps and we never care to get into and look at them - me included.
Yep I know Jumanji there are a few temp measurers around and I guess form what I have seen they are only really reliant on the sensors within any given device.
I did get one of those infra red measurers but it is only good enough for heat sources you can actually track directly onto - for example the cooler fins of a stock cooler.
I'm guilty.
I to take for granted that everybody cleans their PC and changes their compound as often as I do. I'm also guilty of thinking that everybody has a temp monitoring program on the Taskbar and checks it often.
At the end you all got it figured out. Good Job.
UPDATE!
Hey everyone, so after I sort of had my pc running again, it crashed.
I did a little research on my BSOD (Kernel power failure) and had a hunch that it may be my psu.
Swapped my psu out for a friend's extra one and eureka! It worked perfectly, just as new.
Took me over a month to figure out it was my PSU giving me trouble. I hope my endeavor may aid another.
Again, thanks a million for all the help everyone. Great community and great advice.
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