Is This a Temp Problem?

[six_storm]

Hello everyone again. I guess let me spill my story right fast.

If you haven't seen any of my other whiny threads (:D), I had to reformat the other night. Ever since then, my PC has been acting real weird, especially a slow boot up. I just got home, installed RoE and played it for a few minutes. I quit the game to go check out the forums right fast and the weirdest thing happened when I ran FireFox.

You know the "clicking" noise that you hear (hope you guys know what I'm talking about) when you turn your PC on? It makes that noise, like it's powering down and then powers back up. Give or take a few secs and you have a frozen PC. :(

It's somewhat warm up in my room (it says 80 on my thermometer) so I thought it could be that my PC is trying to shut itself off from the heat thresholds. Here are my temps:

HDD Temp: 83F
CPU: 93F
Mobo: 84F
Vid Card: 73C <-----I know! WTF?!

Thing that could be the problem? Or could it be my HDD (it's 3 years old). BTW, what are the life expectancy of a PATA HDD these days? Just wanted to get another person's say on this. Thanks! :)

[Bubba]

I would say all those temps are fine with the exception of the video card- not sure about that one. If your ambient system temp is 84F and your HD is 83F, then that's awesome. In fact, that doesn't sound right to me unless you have some kind of HD cooling going on.

The sound you are describing, however, does sound like possible HD failure. 'Newer' hard drives should last a while, but obviously they don't always. I actually had a rash of bad 80 gb WD drives a few years ago - they were when the 8mb cache drives had just come out and I had two of them go bad on me in under a month. I'd reccomend downloading the WD utility suite from their web site, install it on a bootable floppy, and run it to see if it returns any errors with your HD. Also, check to see if your warranty is up on the HD.

best of luck.
-b

[six_storm]

Ok, now here are my temps since I cut on some A/C and the temp outside dropped:

Vid Card: 69C
CPU: 82F
Mobo: 73F
HDD: 72.5F

What are the life expectancies of a normal PATA HDD? Is it finally time to switch to SATA? :D

[Strahd]

In my experience, there is no device in your PC that causes a clicking noise then a bad hard drive :D

You're temps are fine and the symptoms you describe is definetly a bad hard drive.

I would not recommend IDE or SATA but if I HAD to choose between the two, I'd go SATA.

SCSI rules!

[six_storm]

Thanks for the comment Strahd. I definitly wanna go SATA but I need to buy a new case first. My X-Dreamer has about had it (my fault).

[Ninjaman09]

I'm gonna agree with Strahd, definitely a bad drive. Too bad it's been so long, WD has an awesome drive replacement policy.

Were you using the nV control panel to get your vid card temp? If so, it's probably over-reporting it, and there's probably nothing to worry about. Check Speedfan or Everest for a more accurate temperature report.

[six_storm]

Ok guys, I'm looking to buying a SATA drive tonight. NewEgg has the WD 80GB drive for $60. Is that a pretty good HDD (and deal)? Let me know something please. :)

[six_storm]

Too late :D I went ahead and order that 80 GB WD SATA HDD (whew) earlier and I should be getting it Friday or Monday. Looks like I won't be playing Doom 3 RoE or any other games until then :(