teh Forum

hey guys... I figured you guys would be the best to ask for advice on how to fix my broken pee cee.

I have been playing Crysis for the past week, and it totally maxes out my system even on low settings. In one particular sitting, where there was alot going on in the game graphically, I played for about 2 hours when I started to smell a burned plastic smell coming from my PC. I shut off the game and cranked up the fan speed on both the GPU and CPU, then shut the machine off after a few mins.

no probem.

I played the game some more this past week, and in one sitting I ended up playing for a while (bout 3 hours straight) when I started to smell the burning plastic smell again. So I cranked the fans up again and played a little while longer. After about 15 mins, my pc dies like the power was cut. No lockup, or freeze, no bluescreen, just a dead stop. black screen.

I tried powering back on again, and it would get to the bios startup screen, then cut off. So I let it sit for the rest of the day.

The current state of the pc is that I can boot it up, and run windows, but anytime I try to run a game or anything even a little bit demanding (iTunes for example)... it dies.

My GPU (7800 GTX) is overclocked a little bit, so I thought that was the issue. I flashed it back to the standard speed but that didn't do it. I tried running the ntune stability test, but it just dies right away.

After doing a little research online I figure it might be my cheap PSU dying. So I ordered a new one. It should arrive tomorrow, so we'll see if that fixes it.

Have any of you guys seen something like this? Any suggestions?

I also would suspect the power supply, and yes please keep us posted on the outcome.

I would suspect the power supply as well. I have seen the plastic portions of a CPU cooler melt off and drip all over the case before, but most decent coolers these days have very little plastic on them (except the stock Intel coolers. You'd also notice this if you opened the case. I wish we had a smell-o-phone because then I could tell if it was burning components or passive plastic pieces. I'm going to lean toward power, but you may want to re-apply (or apply as the case may be,) some AS-5 (Arctic Silver 5) to your CPU cooler just in case. Before going to all this trouble though, I'd check the CPU temp in the BIOS. If it's in the acceptable range for your chip, then don't bother with the compound. Otherwise:

If you don't already have it on there, just turn the computer on for a minute to heat the current compound up a bit. Turn it off, pop the cooler off, wipe it and the CPU down with a dry paper towel, (or one with a tiny bit of alcohol,) apply new compound, etc. Make sure to read the AS-5 directions if you haven't used it before as you don't need much at all.

Also the forums on HardOCP are a pretty good resource for narrowing things like this down.

This is kinda like smell-o-phone

PSU seems like the culprit. Do you have a 2ndary video card you can try swapping in in the mean time to eliminate that possibility. Doing some troubleshooting before you swap in the PSU could save you some headaches later if more than one element is damaged.

I want an interactivodular phone.... damnit...

****UPDATE****

FIXED!!!!

J3rk, McNevin: thx for the advice.

I went through your suggested steps to reapply silver for both the cpu and the gpu. They both have zalman all-copper coolers on them so the burning smell couldn't have been caused by them.

I replaced the PSU with a spanking new Raidmax 530watt PSU, and it did the trick. The raidmax has a modular cable design, so the inside of my case is a lot tidier too.

I ran it through the nvidia stability tests, and it went through okay. I have yet to do a real stress-test with Crysis, but I will give that a try tonight and see how it runs.

One last detail that still looks a bit off though....
When I look at the nvidia monitor, it shows the CPU voltage flagged red with a voltage reading of 1.5500 V. My CPU is an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4200+. Is that voltage abnormal for that chip?

Anywho... thanks for reading all of my 'puter-banter.

All of my voltages have red bullets, but I don't think thats what you're talking about.

If your chip is a Windsor, it should be 1.2 - 1.25 if it is a Manchester or Toledo, it should be 1.3 - 1.35, Maybe 1.4. is it Socket 939 or AM2?

If the chip is over-clocked you would naturally bump up the voltage a little but I think that 1.55 is a little much. First, I guess I'll need to know if the processor is over-clocked?

Glad to hear its working though!

Thanks!

The chip is socket 939, and not overclocked.
How do I tell if it's a Windsor, Manchester, or Toledo?

Well if its 939 its not a windsor. CPUz will tell you what you need to know. get it here: http://www.cpuid.com/download/cpu-z-142.zip

So the codename is what you're looking for, also if you could double check the voltage in this prog as well.

ah hah! sweet.

cpuz sez it's a Manchester

Core Voltage is fluctuating between 1.120~1.376

Does that mean nvidia monitor is reading the voltage wrong?

Sure does, I'd put my money on the reading from CPUz, and it looks like that one is a lot closer.

If it plays crysis, I'd say you're all set!

I got Crysis yesterday, and call me crazy, but the full version seems to run slower than the demo did. I can only run on medium, and it’s pretty choppy.

False advertising?

There are custom configs for it, that help quite a bit. And lots of tweak guides. Check the H forums, tweakguides.com, and search for Cuban Legend Crysis configs or something like that.