On 12/06/2013 06:57 PM, Michael Hennebry wrote: > I suspect the pincushiony thing between the video card and the big > black Intel fan of being the heat sink for the CPU, but I do not know. > That case looks very dusty and 60C for an Intel CPU tells us that it is most likely overheating. The big black Intel fan is the fan for the CPU heatsink - which is what it is physically mounted on. *Don't try to remove it.* Since you didn't recognize a CPU fan on sight you clearly have no background in disassembling and reassembling PCs and you will most likely damage the CPU before you are done. Failure to reattach the CPU cooling fan correctly (which involves cleaning off the old heatsink compound and applying new heatsink compound correctly) **will** cause CPU overheating and system problems and can damage the CPU. I would start by gettting a can of compressed air, gently place a finger on the black Intel fan blades so it doesn't spin (spinning up a fan with air turns it into a generator pushing damaging voltage back into the motherboard - you don't want to do that) and blow the all the dust out of the heat sink for the CPU while moving the fan blades with your finger to allow access to the entire heatsink. Then boot the machine and verify that the CPU fan is in fact spinning. Also blow the dust out of the power supply (the silver box at the top left) and off the fins of the video card. -- Benjamin Franz