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Date:      Fri, 25 Aug 2000 10:46:39 -0500
From:      Glenn Johnson <gjohnson@nola.srrc.usda.gov>
To:        hardware@freebsd.org
Subject:   overheating AMD K6-2 400
Message-ID:  <20000825104639.A51927@node1.cluster.srrc.usda.gov>

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About a year ago I purchased an AMD K6-2 400 MHz processor for my
FreeBSD system at home. It had been working fine until recently. The
last two months I have been seeing some rather strange problems like
corrupted files from cvsup, bad dependencies from a buildworld even with
a fresh object tree, and signals 4 and 10 during compilation. The last
week I have had two spontaneous reboots which caused severe file system
damage.

I knew it was hardware trouble and I finally pinned it down to the
CPU. The problems definitely start showing up after the CPU has warmed
up a bit. It is obviously a thermal problem or at least temperature is
a factor. I checked to make sure that the CPU fan was working and it
is. I remembered people on the FreeBSD lists saying that they had to
underclock there AMD K6-2s to get them stable so I clocked this one down
to 350. The problems took a little longer to surface but still do. I
should mention that the motherboard is a FIC VA503+ and the system had
never been overclocked. I pulled the CPU out and put my old Cyrix 133
6x86-MX chip in. This is working fine but is slow of course.

My questions are: Does it sound like the AMD chip is shot or can I try
to enhance the cooling somehow and still use it? Or would I be better
off getting another CPU? If I get another CPU should I get another AMD
or should I go with one of the Cyrix MII models? I would want to put in
a CPU that was at least 400 MHz.

I know this is not specifically FreeBSD related but I have found that
the people on the FreeBSD lists are the most knowledgeable. All responses
are greatly appreciated.

Thanks.

-- 
Glenn Johnson


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