[CentOS] died again

Sat Dec 7 13:04:42 UTC 2013
Benjamin Franz <jfranz at freerun.com>

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