Jared’s Blog

Yesterday I woke up and something wasn’t right. It only took me a few seconds to realize my computer was off. First of all, the thing sounds like a jet when you turn it on; there’s no mistaking it. And second, my computer is never off. Ever. For me, that’d be like shutting off my hearing or vision.

I didn’t think much of it as I do have the thing overclocked (about 550MHz) and from time to time it will crash. Not to mention I’d left it running Ubuntu with the XGL/Compiz compositing window manager running which isn’t exactly stable I’ve found. By the way, XGL/Compiz is sweet as hell. It’s too bad I only had a day to play with it. Anyway, I walked over and hit the power expecting the thing to boot up. Instead, I got nothing.
At this point, my heart dropped into my stomach at the thought my machine had died. I quickly checked the connections, reset the power and tried it again to no avail. Was it the power supply or the motherboard? I didn’t have time to investigate as I had to get ready for work, so I unplugged it thinking maybe some rest would help it out.

After returning home after work, I began assessing the damage in more detail. I couldn’t find any burn marks and there wasn’t that telltale smell of burning PCB anywhere. No matter what I tried, it simply would not turn on. The best I got was a momentary flash of power, but it would only last for a split second before dying again.
I tried replacing the PSU thinking maybe the new one I’d gotten only a couple months ago had kicked the bucket already. That didn’t fix it. The next thing I tried was disconnecting all but my vital components like the RAM and graphics card. Although it seemed unlikely , sometimes components drawing too much power can cause problems (I’d been running with the same amount of stuff since I got the power supply which was 150W more than the previous one which held up fine). Even with the bare essentials, it still wouldn’t budge.

I knew I was in for a drawn out ordeal because I’d have to rip everything out and make sure I wasn’t shorting anywhere. I got to looking at the CPU fan/heatsink and the thing was looking pretty caked in dust. I grabbed some pictures, but I don’t have a computer to put them on at the moment, so they’ll have to wait. Trust me, I think something was living in there.

After a run out for some new thermal paste and some compressed air, I began the cleaning. Even after the thoughrough cleaning and rebuild, I still got nothing. As a last resort, I reset the CMOS to clear my overclock and go back to defaults. If that and running outside the case with the bare essentials didn’t cure it’s illness, nothing would. And it didn’t.

Defeated, I returned everything to my room and hauled out the old laptop I have. I was planning on ordering a CPU, motherboard, RAM, and video card soon anyway, but there were some things I wanted to pay off first like my trip to Jamaica. I did some research and price comparisons and in the end I settled on a Core 2 Duo system that I should be able to overclock like mad. See the specs below.

After reading this, I decided to go with the cheapest and slowest Core 2 Duo. Because this was sort of an impromptu purchase, I didn’t want to go all out and spend a bunch, but at the same time, I wanted some decent performance. According to the previously mentioned guide, they liked the Gigabyte board for overclocking, so I went with it. Of course for overclocking, you want a nice fat heatsink to cool your processor. The Typhoon wasn’t my first choice, but I think it’ll more than do the job. I was actually looking at this monster, but after measuring my case, I wasn’t sure I’d be able to put the side panel on. The graphics card I found for $120 after rebate so that was sort of a no-brainer. I don’t really game much these days anyway, except for WoW, and I don’t even know how much longer I’ll be playing that. With the RAM, I was really tempted to get 2GB, but I opted for 1GB instead because you can always add more later.

Update: As promised here are some pictures. If I did blow the CPU, this may be why.