Old PC issues

[shift]

Someone gave me an old PC they didn't need. It's HDD was dead and it is old so they didn't want it. Figured I could get it running to at least see what kind of credit it can get but things aren't going to plan. I'm wondering if I someone can give me some advice on what they would do, e.g. Throw it to the e-recyclers or try to fix it?

It has a Pentium 4 (which made me laugh) 3.4 GHz, and a GeForce GTX 8800, the power supply squeals which suggests a capacitor has gone, the bios says the CPU temp is around 86C and I have seen it up to 99C! Yet I have taken the heat sink off, cleaned everything and applied new thermal paste. I touched the heatsink and felt no heat (is that normal?) so I don't know if the sensor is faulty or the heat sink isn't contacting properly.

The HDD was dead so I've been trying to run linux lite off a USB stick, however, the USB is so slow (I don't know if it is USB 1 or 2) and I seem to only be able to get through the booting procedure if I select linux lite safe boot. I've plugged an old laptop HDD in which I tried to install linux lite on but that isn't booting either.

Any idea what I should try next? Or just give up on it as it is so old (and likely a power hog)?

motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3P and PSU is a Thermaltake 500W if that means anything to anyone.

[chooka03]

Sounds like a lot of effort for something so old.
Choice is your mate.  Personally I think I'd send it to E waste.

[jave808]

Any idea what I should try next? Or just give up on it as it is so old (and likely a power hog)?

motherboard is a Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3P and PSU is a Thermaltake 500W if that means anything to anyone.

That board can support a quad-core like a Q6600. I think I have one of these lying around and can send to you.

If you have a spare PSU, try that. Plus install my CPU and it might crunch something. But it definitely is old.

[tazzduke]

Hey I will look in the shed, i might have a Q8400 and a Q9400.

They might not be the best, but they might still be able to chug along on WCG.

Or it could be setup as a GPU only cruncher.

Regards

[shift]

Thanks Jave and Tazzduke. If you find something and are willing to part with it then let me know and what you want for it etc and if you want it back if it doesn't work.

[jave808]

Thanks Jave and Tazzduke. If you find something and are willing to part with it then let me know and what you want for it etc and if you want it back if it doesn't work.

Okay, I dug up some old CPUs. I found a Xeon X3330, X3230 and an X3220.
These are all LGA775 CPUs and should not only fit, but work in your motherboard.

[shift]

I'll try messaging you

[shift]

Well, that took way longer than I had expected but I have managed to get the xeon x3330 (quad core 2.66GHz) that Jave gave me working in the old PC (thanks again Jave). I kept having issues with powering it on and after trying a different power supply (which didn't help) I believe the two reasons were

• I needed to update the bios from version 4 to version 7 so that it could accept the new cpu
• The cpu cooler has a dodgy pin that meant the cooler wasn't clipped in properly every time and I suspect this was overheating the cpu and also confusing my troubleshooting process

I eventually figured out that the bios update file from gigabyte despite being an .exe file could be unzipped so I could get the actual bios update file to use in Qflash (the gigabyte instructions weren't correct and the .exe suggested I needed windows which I didn't have). With the new cpu the pc is running cooler and went from drawing 300W! idling to 140W idling (190 crunching with gpu and cpu) which is a huge improvement.

I have also found that I still can't turn the PC back on unless I have let it cool down for say 10 minutes, if I try it just power cycles on and off every few seconds, the thing that seems to be getting hottest is (I believe) is the northbridge and its heatsink.

I've also noticed that memtest86 fails when I have the four sticks of RAM in it. There are two sets of different RAM, if they get mixed it has an error in the memtest but everything else seems to work ok. Maybe this is contributing to the hot northbridge but most things I read suggest they are always hot to touch.