PC overheating?

[vhawk]

how could I tell if my pc was overheating? it just suddenly shut down as if I had switched the power off, but it's working fine now- touch wood. I figure there has to be a reason and thought of overheating. I'm not in a very hot room and I can't smell anything odd.presumably it shuts down if it gets too hot. thank you if you can help

I'm running xp and it's a generic computer with an Athalon chip and 1gig of ram, the whole thing inc fan and psu is only about 18onths old

how can I find out how hot the board etc is?

 

[raybay]

Change your thermal paste, clean your power supply fan, your cpu fan, and such.
Computers can take a lot of heat. But if there is any risk, you can buy thermal measuring cards and software cheaply.
Athlons have always run very very hot, but even at 65 C, they do not seem to fail...
Just keep your case and cooling channels clean.

 

[vhawk]

thank you for the advice, so is nothing software wise that tells me the temperature?

I'm a bit hampered by only having one arm, but did it sound like overheating to you? it hasn't happened again yet touch wood

 

[raybay]

Well, yes there is some software that will report the temperature, provided that your motherboard will work with you on it...Heat Monitoring

A number of motherboard makers bundle temperature, overclocking and other monitoring software with their motherboards. Gigabyte and MSI for example have their EasyTune and PCAlert/FuzzyLogic software, that allow you to diddle with your motherboard settings in real time without the need to reboot..

There is third party software that you can find with a Gurgle search and download, such as MotherboardMonitor. If your manufacturer does not provide their own software, you can check out Motherboard monitor that you can minimize as a tray icon or used as an On Screen overlay so you can keep an eye on provided sensors.

One good external package is SpeedFan which is intended to help you control your fan speeds, but it also includes monitoring of temperatures, fan speeds and voltages. It can even monitor your hard drive temperature (if your HD supports it) and also show S.M.A.R.T. info.

You can find all this stuff by doing a few searches with your favorite search engine

But it all depends on the board... And is nearly always unnecessary unless you are doing a lot of intense gaming.

 

[vhawk]

thank you very much, according to belarcc&p)
Board: ALiveNF4G-DVI
Bus Clock: 200 megahertz
BIOS: American Megatrends Inc. P1.10 08/09/2006


I don't know if that means anything to you, but speed fan aounds good i'll google it