Well it was 96F today in Utah and I decided to run a heat test on my machine. I was loading up my car helping someone move. The car was in the sun for about 4 hours in the middle of a parking lot in direct sun light the entire time. My watch read the internal car temperature as 127F when I was about to leave. I decided to power up the machine as a "worst case senario" test to see if anything on my carputers cooling system was lacking. I first took it into BIOS as I had forgot to install MotherBoard Monitor. The CPU temperature was 47C and slowly rose over a two minute period up to about 54C idle. I then went to reboot and my primary system drive was detected in BIOS as "IIJIIJIIJIIJIIJIIJIIJ" flickering between the
II's as
W's. Not looking too good. Obviously the bios asked for some bootable media. All the other drives showed up with their correct names, 80Gig Maxtor storage drive and the Lite On DVD and CDRW drives. I restarted 3 times and got the same gobbledy gook each time.
I started my half hour drive slowly deciding what I will do to fix the machine's system drive. The storage drive is in an aluminum coolmax with an additional two 130mm fans above it blowing over the heatsink fins. The CPU has copper shim and arctic silver thermal paste. But the system drive has no room for fans.
After ten minutes of dreams of heading up a team of lab technicians from DuPont working on prototype liquid nitrogen cooling systems I decided to try a reboot, still no good, same crap name on the drive. Another ten minutes later and I was ultra annoyed by my only CD in the car that I had last listened to over 3 weeks ago and was not about to let myself dip back into radio hell (oh why had I left my XM at home). I went for another reboot and the drive name came up correctly, at the moment I normally get the "resuming windows" message I got a garbled screen of lime green and orange. One more reboot and it resumed back into windows perfectly and Ohio Players - Funky Worm was thumping through my woofers just as I had left it.
Now I am left trying to decide how to remedy the situation. I think that I may need to relocate the system drive to where it can get proper cooling. I did consider some kind of thermal check on the power up sequence that wouldn't allow me to start up the computer until the temp dropped to a certain level, but I think I am better off just fixing the problem with cooling. It would be nice to be able to flush the system with a coolant before booting. Similar to how the Kyrotech machines bring the CPU core down to a certain level before allowing a boot.
Overall I am pretty happy that the remainder of my system everything beyond the 13gig IBM system drive worked flawlessly in such crazy heat. I was most worried about the CPU's but I think they will be fine and am glad I decided to go with P3's over an XP Athlon. All suggestions welcome
