Old Selfbuild switching off under pressure

Cameraman · 06 Sep 2016

Hi everyone. I know it's an old system but at 72 I'm not about to change it soon. It has been 100% since 2009 but last week I had to change the Bios battery and I'm not certain It's back to how it should be.
Please look at the readings on the enclosed Jpeg and tell me if you see anything WRONG.
Be gentle... I have little or no knowledge about things these days. The symptoms are it can run for days then if I look at a film or play Flight Sim it will suddenly shut down (no blue screen) and then it re-boots in to windows. somtimes, it hangs so I have to go through Bios (f2) but I change nothing, exit and go back into windows no problem.Thank you.

rvcjew · 06 Sep 2016

I would first run furmark on it and see if you get crazy GPU temps since you say your getting the issue under GPU load. That is also quite hot under load for your cpu max temp, might be time for some new TIM do you know what TIM is on it at the moment?
Video Card - Stress Test with Furmark

Mellon Head · 06 Sep 2016

A couple of questions:

1. Does the GPU have a fan? It's running awfully hot at idle and the fan may not be spinning fast enough if it has one.
2. How good is your case cooling? Do you have any fans blowing air into and out of the case?
3. Your RAM is set to clock lower than it's capabilities. Did you set it lower because of an instability? Or is it just set to auto?

rvcjew is right about he high CPU temps. Any high load going to that temperature will likely cause the PC to shut down or reboot in order to cool off the CPU. That's why it does it playing Flight Simulator. Anything CPU intensive that drives the CPU temp up that high is going to cause you problems until we can get your temps under control.

Cameraman · 07 Sep 2016

Thank you for your replies here are some answers.
1. Does the GPU have a fan? Yes, Speedfan is running on auto at about 50%
2. How good is your case cooling? There are 3 case fans and on big one on the CPU
3. Your RAM is set to clock lower than it's capabilities. Did you set it lower because of an instability? Or is it just set to auto? Its just set to auto as it never was stable at 1600

I would first run furmark on it I will run this tomorrow thank you.
might be time for some new TIM do you know what TIM is on it at the moment? in 16 years I have never heard of TIM. What is it please ?
Thank you for your help

Lance1 · 07 Sep 2016

TIM is "Thermal Interface Material" or Thermal Paste. To apply a fresh layer of paste you would need to remove the CPU fan and clean the old paste from the fan and CPU and apply and spread a thin layer on the CPU then reattach the fan.

rvcjew · 08 Sep 2016

Cameraman said:

Thank you for your replies here are some answers.
1. Does the GPU have a fan? Yes, Speedfan is running on auto at about 50%
2. How good is your case cooling? There are 3 case fans and on big one on the CPU
3. Your RAM is set to clock lower than it's capabilities. Did you set it lower because of an instability? Or is it just set to auto? Its just set to auto as it never was stable at 1600

I would first run furmark on it I will run this tomorrow thank you.
might be time for some new TIM do you know what TIM is on it at the moment? in 16 years I have never heard of TIM. What is it please ?
Thank you for your help

As Lance1 has said you would remove your heatsink (fan will probably stay on the heatsink depending on the type) then clean off old paste and reapply with new paste (I recommend Geild GC Extreme myself). Since you said your cpu has a big fan I take it is not the stock intel cooler for that generation of cpu's that looks like this?
EDIT: Have you already tried blowing out your cpu fan and heatsink with a can of air?

Cameraman · 11 Sep 2016

Thank you for all your help. (the cpu cooler a Cooler Master Hyper TX2) and some of the paste was missing.
In the meantime my brother was chucking out his old Q9550 and 8Gb of DDR3 1333 RAM so I swapped mine for his and the temp seem much better and all is stable again.

I dont know if 8GB or soso memory is better or worse than 4GB of Corsair 1666 Dominator because the pc feels about the same in responses but is cooler and stable.

Thank you to this forum, as always agreat source of help and kindness you should be proud.
If you have any other comment (over the change) I shall keep a watch out.
In the meantime I will dream on that .....one day an i7......hohum