Smells like burning at fulll load

[thor300]

An overclocked Pentium D 830 @ 3.3GHz on a biostar 945P mainboard smell like burning when running at full load, then after 2-3 hours the cooler is checked and 1 og the four is loose. Was it a good idea to wait that long before checking the cooler? I mean, it was only smelling like that for a few hours, not a good reason to check for errors is it? And anyway, its not so strange its loose coz everyone knows that lga775 sucks bigtime when it come to attaching coolers, right?

Now the MB is dead, but for sure this had nothing to do with the loose cooler?

I guess we all agree that this was done professionally and the user is not to blame at all? Only nooobs would disagree with this method...

:)

[Joe Fenton]

If you smell something or see smoke (God forbid), you shouldn't even try to shut down - you should yank the power cord from the wall. The sooner you remove power, the less damage you'll do to the hardware. You MIGHT corrupt your software enough to have to reinstall, but that's far easier to do than replace a mobo or CPU. I have all my stuff plugged into an UPS - if anything looks (or smells) amiss, I just flip the UPS off and EVERYTHING goes off. You might consider this yourself.

HSFs should ALWAYS be tight and snug. If not, they aren't seated correctly and won't cool properly. This can lead to chip failures.

Another thing it MIGHT have been - too much current for your mobo. The Pentium Ds are dual-core CPUs - they have two cores and use twice the power. This means they'll draw twice the current from your mobo. Then you overclocked it - that causes it to draw even MORE current. Quite a few mobos actually MELTED when you tried to use a Pentium Prescott in them. Now try to put TWO in a mobo. See the problem? A LOT of mobos simply won't take modern Pentiums simply because of the power issue. Always check if your mobo will handle the CPU you intend to use on it. Make sure everything works at a normal clock rate before trying to overclock.

[thor300]

Thanx for informative reply. You have many good points there that i agree with. This didnt happen to me, was someone else who found it to be a "good idea" to leave it running without checking for errors. The most important thing is maybe what you said about the power consumption, could be that biostar cant handle it well, its a very cheap mobo. I have an Abit AL8 mobo with D830 and no problems after i upgraded to latest bios that was just released.

If anyone considers a Pentium D and are afraid of the power consumption i can still recommend it, as Fenton mentions the mobo must be able to handle the power so go for a quality brand. The dual's boxed cooler has a more massive copper core that will give an idle temp of around 33 celsius at lowest fan speed even when clocked to 3.6, and a quality 350 watt PSU (AOpen myself) will easily handle the power in a normal system with a reasonable number of harddrives, but i have no idea what will happen if you have a gf 6800 Ultra screencard and/or a bad PSU (Qtec or Chieftech ++) :)

[Joe Fenton]

I know people like that. They usually call you when it's too late. :D

"It was smoking, and then the circuit breaker cut out this side of the house. Can you fix it for me?" :rolleyes: