Well... thats interesting

[Sovek]

Ok, so last year I started having some serious issues playing World of Tanks online, or for that matter, any game. Loading took forever, and even when I did load in, it would freeze for several seconds at a time. Due to the HDD sounding like a 90's HDD, I suspected the drive, got a WD 1TB HDD, installed windows, got everything moved over, seemed to work, but it was still kinda sluggish.

 

Fast forward to last week. Playing World of Warships, was fine, for a while, but then it got to the point where if I even thought about playing more than 2 matches, the game would freeze for several seconds, and usually any time I fired my guns. Weird. I also noticed that the computer DID NOT like being on for more than a couple hours, if that.

 

Perplexed I was suspecting malware/viruses or a dying drive, AGAIN. After several scans by AVG, Spybot, Malware Bytes, ect nothing. Took it to a local computer shop along with the RAM to see if anything came out bad, nope. So I bring in the MB and CPU, still nothing. Even the old drive tests fine. Makes noise, but tests fine. Then I got to searching and came across a post about possibly the southbridge overheating. Well, the board is 4 years old, being on for 6+ hrs a day, over 12 saturday and sunday, its possible the chip is overheating.

 

So when I pulled the heatsink off, what I found was not anything resembling thermal paste, it was hard, caked on, and took me a good half hour to remove the stuff from either chip or the heatsink. Small dab of Artic Silver 5, pop the HS on, and then fire up WoWS, see what happens. Granted I wasnt playing all day, but dang... even loading into windows isnt taking long, and I was able to have my computer on all day sunday without issue.

 

Next time I buy a board, I think I'm gonna save myself the trouble and put my own paste on the southbridge. ugh.

 

Edit: Oh, any time windows would update, I'd sit there for 5-10 minutes just for it to update.

[Guest]

@Sovek What board manufacturer was it? ASRock?

[LNW]

Interesting!! Would never have thought of that myself.

[orangecat]

I almost always reapply thermal paste myself since stock thermal paste tends to be cheap and harden over time.

[Sovek]

@Sovek What board manufacturer was it? ASRock?

Asus actually, older H61 mATX board. I WILL NEVER buy an ASRock board, Gigabyte or Asus are the only boards I trust.

[Guest]

Asus actually, older H61 mATX board. I WILL NEVER buy an ASRock board, Gigabyte or Asus are the only boards I trust.

Yeah, had some bad experiences (and still have some^^) with ASRrock, I wouldn't recommend them. But it depends on the chipset really, Asus, MSI and Gigabyte (in that order) would be my choices atm though.