I hadn't had many shutdowns but the fan was working continuously - an early sign of failure.
The shutdown is a protection mechanism designed to protect the processor from thermal runaway but such a crash could cause serious damage to the disk. I decided to follow your web site information. It is worth stressing that silver loaded compounds should be used rather than some of the run of the mill stuff.
Now the fan cycles as it should and all is cool!! Bliss.
The problem is certainly in the thermal compound. On my machine it was a foil backed tape. It would be interesting to know why this is failing, presummably Dell must have the answers by now, but will they tell us? Looking at Intel's site I note that the later 2.4GHz pentium 4 operates about 5C below the early versions, maybe this would help Dell's fix.
Thanks for the input and the easy explaination of the process.
My smartstep stays on 8 to 12 hours a day 7 days a week and for the most part I wasn't having any troubles. The 250n would only thermal out on me when I connected an external monitor. Since I do presetation graphics this has caused me a bit of embarrassment. Lucky I use this as a backup and not a primary show machine. I believe that since the already weak cooling system was taxed when the actual physical plug was in place. I haven't recieved my arctic silver yet but I went in and cleaned off the foil and the waxy goo and blew out the heat sink. I was able to connect it to an external monitor and run it for over 8 hours with just the bare processor against the heatsink. The fan isnt running as loud as it was before either. My arctic silver will be in this week and I will do the final phase of the surgery along with drilling out the holes as suggested.
One interesting thing tho... I have a refurbed 250n... it seems that someone... maybe someone at Dell... beat me to the foil removal behind the keyboard...
It has obviously been cut and just half of the foil is missing.
Along with the arctic silver I have a gig of ram and one of those dandy Hitachi 60gig/7200 hard drives in mail. I look forward to a performance boost. Is there anymore info regarding the use of a 3k processor int he smartstep?
prodsafe
5 Posts
0
March 13th, 2004 20:00
An excellent procedure.
I hadn't had many shutdowns but the fan was working continuously - an early sign of failure.
The shutdown is a protection mechanism designed to protect the processor from thermal runaway but such a crash could cause serious damage to the disk. I decided to follow your web site information. It is worth stressing that silver loaded compounds should be used rather than some of the run of the mill stuff.
Now the fan cycles as it should and all is cool!! Bliss.
The problem is certainly in the thermal compound. On my machine it was a foil backed tape. It would be interesting to know why this is failing, presummably Dell must have the answers by now, but will they tell us? Looking at Intel's site I note that the later 2.4GHz pentium 4 operates about 5C below the early versions, maybe this would help Dell's fix.
Nashvilleshadow
1 Message
0
July 26th, 2004 02:00
Thanks for the input and the easy explaination of the process.
My smartstep stays on 8 to 12 hours a day 7 days a week and for the most part I wasn't having any troubles. The 250n would only thermal out on me when I connected an external monitor. Since I do presetation graphics this has caused me a bit of embarrassment. Lucky I use this as a backup and not a primary show machine. I believe that since the already weak cooling system was taxed when the actual physical plug was in place. I haven't recieved my arctic silver yet but I went in and cleaned off the foil and the waxy goo and blew out the heat sink. I was able to connect it to an external monitor and run it for over 8 hours with just the bare processor against the heatsink. The fan isnt running as loud as it was before either. My arctic silver will be in this week and I will do the final phase of the surgery along with drilling out the holes as suggested.
One interesting thing tho... I have a refurbed 250n... it seems that someone... maybe someone at Dell... beat me to the foil removal behind the keyboard...
It has obviously been cut and just half of the foil is missing.
Along with the arctic silver I have a gig of ram and one of those dandy Hitachi 60gig/7200 hard drives in mail. I look forward to a performance boost. Is there anymore info regarding the use of a 3k processor int he smartstep?
Have a good one...