Kids and fan controls = :(

sundevil_1997 · Post by **sundevil_1997** » Mon May 16, 2005 8:52 am

When I did my research about the sunbeam rheobus, I learned two definite cons:

1) The LED's are bright. Way bright. Squinting bright.
2) If you have your CPU fan hooked up to one, and you're not careful, the fan can get turned down without you knowing until something burns.

Well, I can confirm both of these now.

The LED's...ya, nuff said.

I'm either going to cover them or do the "push them back into their shell" mod.

And the second....I had JUST put the controller in, and the temps all looked good. I was controlling the CPU fan, a HD fan, and the exhaust fan. I then launched into World of Warcraft for some fun. I noticed once my 16month old daughter standing in front of my PC mesmerized (and perhaps temporarily blinded) by the pretty LED's. I also caught her trying to touch them with her foot (I assume she was afraid to get too close to the bright things). I scooted her away, checked the colors again on the lights, making sure the CPU one was blue, and then continued on.

A few minutes later, my screen froze for 2 seconds...then the entire PC turned off. Uh oh. I thought at first it was the PSU, because I had put a fan adapter and an 80mm fan on the CPU and it blocked the air intake fan of the PSU by almost half. There are 2 fans on this PSU, though, so I didn't really think it would be an issue. I waited a few min, tried turning it back on, and it'd stay on for like 2 sec, then back off....confirming it was the PSU, I thought. So, I grabbed another PSU, hooked it up real quick, and it came on and stayed on.

Once I got into Windows, I remembered that I had put Speedfan on earlier and it had been logging temps, so I thought I'd take a peek just to see. Well, this is what I saw:

Yikes. I had heard that AMD's will just burn, but I guess the ASUS board has some kind of heat-shutoff, because the CPU still works. The old PSU does too. I can only GUESS that my little girl somehow turned the fan off and I didn't notice.

Since then, I decided to plug the CPU fan into the motherboard header instead and control it through speedfan. And I'm PROBABLY going to mount the rheobus a little more internally and cover it with a piece of cardboard, until I buy a new case that has a door.

Ah well, a (fortunately painless) lesson learned.

IceWindius · Post by **IceWindius** » Mon May 16, 2005 9:05 am

You have learned well young padawan......

niels007 · Post by **niels007** » Mon May 16, 2005 4:31 pm

Well nothing broke did it?

And judging by the 70degs nothing was really close to meltdown either..

A while ago I wanted to reboot my pc but ticked 'shut down' accidentally.. No biggie, I just turned the pc on again, forgetting that the fans stopped spinning and at their voltage don't start up by themselves.. I was doing some testing and was surprised to see 3Dmark crash to desktop after a test or two. Fire up SpeedFan. Cpu temp: 95c

Windows still worked, sort off.. I turned the pc off for a while and had a drink.. It's been working perfectly ever since: no damage!

BrianE · Post by **BrianE** » Mon May 16, 2005 6:52 pm

I remember your post earlier saying how you were worried about your daughter playing with the controls - I guess you were right!

Oh well, at least no harm was done.

m0002a · Post by **m0002a** » Mon May 16, 2005 7:20 pm

70C is not even close to meltdown.

niels007 · Post by **niels007** » Mon May 16, 2005 11:55 pm

Actually I'm comfortable with my Athlon xp running at 70c under load, which is really no issue at all. I think your bios simply had a 70c shutdown programmed and your system was stable as a rock! AMD64 apparantly can't get as hot as the XP.

Has anyone tested where their 64 bitter tends to get unstable? Was AMD just playing it safe with a max 'core temp' in the 70s instead of 85 with the XP or is there actually a difference?

StarfishChris · Post by **StarfishChris** » Tue May 17, 2005 2:47 am

I haven't got mine high enough to test it out. (I left the fan off by accident and it froze 5 minutes later, at ~70)

sundevil_1997 · Post by **sundevil_1997** » Tue May 17, 2005 7:47 am

niels007 wrote:Actually I'm comfortable with my Athlon xp running at 70c under load, which is really no issue at all. I think your bios simply had a 70c shutdown programmed and your system was stable as a rock!

Ya, I was at first concerned about the temp, but since then have come to realize it wasn't even really close. No lasting damage at all. I'm glad it is programmed to shut down, though, because when I have the fans going, even undervolted, it normally doesn't get over even 60....barely over 50.

This was an AMD Athlon XP 1.2 GHz on an ASUS A7N8X.

Interesting that looking at the graph, it was already starting to level off...maybe somewhere around 80? Curious anyways...I guess just from the other air circulation. Extremely bad passive cooling.

The funny thing is that the reason I hadn't plugged the CPU fan into the MB header originally is because I thought that the PWM was causing really bad fan noise when I booted up. In fact, it was so bad that I thought the original CPU fan (a 60mm) was going bad, so that's why I replaced it with the 80mm. Well, as it turns out, it was the video card fan making the noise.

The 80mm in the MB header works and sounds great. Oh well.

cmh · Post by **cmh** » Tue May 17, 2005 7:55 am

The last parts for my new build are arriving today, and this post reminds me that my kids may pose more of a threat to my new hardware than they have already demonstrated to my software. (>20 Dora the Explorers and Blue's Clueses open at the same time, freezing Windows. Repeatedly. Because if double-clicking is good, septuple clicking must be fantastic.) They should add a child proximity monitor to Speedfan.

sundevil_1997 · Post by **sundevil_1997** » Tue May 17, 2005 8:50 am

cmh wrote: (>20 Dora the Explorers and Blue's Clueses open at the same time, freezing Windows. Repeatedly. Because if double-clicking is good, septuple clicking must be fantastic.) They should add a child proximity monitor to Speedfan.

Heh...sounds familiar. I have a niece and nephew that put the PC through it's paces. I made them a separate account in Win XP so they could only screw up their stuff and not access important stuff.

Now if I could only get my power button to respond to only my finger print....

nici · Post by **nici** » Tue May 17, 2005 9:53 am

sundevil_1997 wrote:
Now if I could only get my power button to respond to only my finger print....

Might as well get a lockable case too, otherwise they they are probably smart enough to open up the case and "hot-wire" the computer