Did my cpu fry at 75 C? Some practical advice/tips wanted.

[foycur]

I unfortunately had a failure of my CPU heatsink fan, and I was out of the room while it was happening. I have ASUS PC probe always on and running in t he background. I Heard it beeping, and I ran in to check it out. My CPU temp zoomed from its usual 35 C to about 75 C. It was there for maybe no more than minute or two. I yanked the cord and let it cool. I rebooted it and got into the BIOS to check out fan speeds and such. The core CPU temp was slowly creeping up past 40 C and the CPU fan was definitely hurting (spinning only at about 500 RPM). I've looked at the "is my cpu too hot" sticky, and I know that running anything above 70 C is bad. However, I wanted some practical advice from more experienced builders on the likelihood of the processor being toasted.

So, needless to say I need a new heatsink/fan which is fine. My big concern is did I do any permanent damage to the CPU? That's what I'm concerned about the most, since if I did fry my P4 this means that I'll have to go ahead and get the new A8N SLI board and pick up an Athlon 64, and that means getting a new video card (nudge nudge wink) with PCI express. My wife certainly won't be pleased.

 

[howard_hopkinso]

The chances are that once you get the new fan, everything will be fine.

You will only need to replace the fan, and not the entire heatsink.

I doubt that your cpu is damaged.

In the meantime, don`t use the computer.

Regards Howard

 

[pcm1289]

Try Thermal Grease

Also, try taking off the entire heatsink altogether and check the top of the CPU chip for something known as thermal grease. Thermal grease tends to be white or silver and occasionally acts like an adhesive. If your CPU does not have any of this, I would strongly recommend getting some since it will greatly increase the transfer of heat from the heatsink to the CPU. Don't worry, thermal grease is cheap and you can even find it at almost any local computer store if you don't want to order it online (shipping occasionally costs more than the thermal grease itself).

Also, I agree with Howard that your CPU is not fried since you were able to turn on your computer. If you had turned on your computer and gotten beeps (or nothing)(I have had experiences when both happened), then you would have known that it fried. You can either replace the entire heatsink unit (and if you do, they normally come with thermal grease) or you can just replace the fan.