Never heard about repasting either. Unless it shrinks I don't see why it would be needed, re. what BigEd wrote - it's there only "to cover microscopic deviations from flatness". It doesn't conduct heat particularly well (not better than metal against metal for sure), but it's better than just air in those spots. Not that I'm an expert on thermal paste but that's what sounds logical to me.

-Tor

It was doing very well. I just don't want it gluing my CPU to the heatsink.



Oh yeah, oops. When I went into the BIOS and checked the voltages, the 12V rail was outputting 11.4V, when it used to output around 12.1V. That, and it doesn't seem to be outputting enough power. When I have it under a heavy load for a while it starts to do that clicking thing I talked about earlier, and then cuts out. If I run my system where the CPU and GPU are repeatedly switching between low and high speed (like when I was playing with a little square I made in Java), then the PSU cuts out. And then there will be times when my PC just freezes altogether, which can also be caused by a faulty PSU. And when I got a new case to improve the cooling, the SATA power cable couldn't reach the drive bay, forcing me to put one of my drives in the CD drive bay, and use an extension cable for my other drive. And the PSU is 400W, which for my system I need around 500W. And I plan on upgrading the CPU to a Phenom II x4 965, so I'll need more power to run that. And that is why I ordered a nice 500W PSU that should be here soon.



Seems correct to me. I just find it a little concerning if thermal paste is able to act more like super glue.

I got my new power supply, now my PC doesn't cut out on me anymore. I found out that the random freezes are caused by my CPU getting old and I had to turn down my overclock a tad. Oh well.

So 5 years later, after having a brand new PC, I decided to revisit my old one now that I am older and wiser, and I found the true cause of all my past issues. I took apart the entire system after it died entirely, and I found that the CPU power connector was charred to all hell. I replaced it with one from a dead board and what do ya know, the computer runs perfectly fine now. No freezes, no intermittent shutoff, if anything it ran better than I have ever seen it before. I can finally put this mystery to rest 5 years later haha

Pics of the damage and repair:

That does look like it's had a hard life.

I'm not 100% sure what cause that to happen, but my guess it's a combination of the machine's age, crappy PSU cables, and asking a 4 pin to provide power for an aggressively overclocked processor. Now I have another problem though... What to do with this thing. Because it runs perfectly fine now, so I don't want to throw it away. Maybe a home server or something

run Forth