Dead chip? or something else...

[CavemanJ]

Ok, tonight I decided to swap out my HSF.  No big deal.  Noted some dust accumulated at DIMM nearest the chip, so popped it out, got the air can, and cleaned it out (while the chip was off the board).  Put it all back together, made sure everything was tight, plugged everything back in and hit the power.  A few seconds after the monitor came out of standby the system shut itself down.  Only signs of power were the LEDs on the back for the network plug.

Flipped the switch on the PSU off, rechecked everything, even reseated the DIMM I had pulled out.  Didn't help, still shuts itself down a few seconds after kicking the monitor out of standby.  Even wondered if the new fan was pulling too much power, since it was on the same line from the PSU as the plug I have in the GFFX5600Ultra, so moved it to a different line and unplugged the case fans, just to see.  Nope, didn't help.

For nearly a year now the idle temp has been 52c, and running under a load it never showed more than 55c.  Today the idle temp was 54-55c, and the machine was a little sluggish with AH (froze first time I went to log in, task manager>end task cleared it, then back into AH and fps were down a little) and with Star Wars Galaxies (fps basically froze at 1frame every 15sec).

If I had another chip handy I'd swap it out to see if that's it, but before I land myself in the sights of the wife-ack ordering one just to test I thought I'd see if anyone had any other ideas.

XP 2100+
MSI K7N2-G board (nForce2)
Gainward GF FX5600 Ultra
Antec case & 400w PSU

[bloom25]

Are you sure the heatsink is properly oriented on the CPU.  It sounds like the system might be overheating and shutting down.  That would only take about 2 seconds if the heatsink wasn't making contact with the CPU.  If you pull the heatsink back off, be sure the corners of the cpu die aren't chipped or broken off.

[CavemanJ]

My God.. I feel like such a noob right now.  That's exactly what it was bloom.  Though I was starting to wonder if I had chipped a corner on the die.

As I was finishing this post, one of my boys reached into the case and tried to wiggle the HSF, wanting to be helpful.  So to let him feel like he was helping I tried it once more, and it went all the way to the login and lasted half a minute before it shut down.  He got all excited and ran down the hall yelling 'I fixed it!'.

After pulling all the plugs again, I grabbed a small mirror and a flashlight to have a took, and sure enough the edge of the sink was sittin on the socket hinge, so it wasn't making good contact with the chip.  I did this once before, long ago, with the same type of heatsink (Thermalrite SK6).  Didn't connect the two because that other box just ran hot and this one was shutting itself down.

Oh well.. lesson learned again, and it made my son's night, so it's all good =) Too bad it didn't help the temps more than a degree or two =\