0Fixing stability issues with Asus E35M1‑M Pro

The basis of my main HTPC is an AMD E350 Brazos in the form of an Asus E35M1‑M Pro. I had quite a lot of prob­lems with the sys­tem when I first built it, which were caused by issues with the Seag­ate Momentus XT stor­age drive I used. These were fixed a good while ago via firm­ware update from Seag­ate, and since then the sys­tem has largely worked without any issue.

About 6 months ago the sys­tem star­ted to exhib­it prob­lems again, occa­sion­ally crash­ing and fail­ing to find the boot device, oth­er times becom­ing slug­gish even with under no CPU usage.  These instances were rare enough that I ignored them as I plan to upgrade the sys­tem in the next year or so any­way.  In the last 6 weeks or so how­ever the prob­lems got much worse with daily crash­ing.  This was prob­lem­at­ic enough to pre­vent reli­able record­ing of pro­grammes and so I had to do some­thing.  My ini­tial thought was that there was prob­ably still some kind of freak incom­pat­ib­il­ity between the sys­tem and the momentus XT drive, but whilst wait­ing for a new SSD drive I decided to give the all-in-one mother­board some TLC.  To my sur­prise I had­n’tre­placed the stock thermal com­pound mater­i­al under the heat­sink for CPU/GPU/Chipset.  I removed the heat­sink and cleaned off all the old com­pound with some Arc­tiClean (if you don’t have any I highly recom­mend it!).  I then used some Diamond‑7 com­pound and replaced the heat­sink.  Finally, I ripped the “asus” logo off the top of the heat­sink, as this appeared to me to simply restrict all nat­ur­al upward air­flow fro the middle of the heat­sink — redu­cing it’s effi­ciency sig­ni­fic­antly.  I then restored the board to the sys­tem and recon­nec­ted everything.  To my pleas­ure it booted up cor­rectly, the only mis­take I’d made was to plug the front and rear speak­ers in the wrong way round.

Since then I’ve not had a single crash or funny beha­viour — here’s hop­ing the prob­lem was a heat issue caused by badly applied cheap thermal “gunk”.  If you’re hav­ing Sta­bil­ity issues with any PC sys­tem it’s always worth recon­nect­ing all the con­nec­tions to the mother­board, and repla­cing any thermal com­pound that shipped with the system.

Got some thoughts of your own? Indulge yourself below by commenting! If you would like to subscribe please use the subscribe link on the menu at the top right. You can also share this with your friends by using the social links below. Cheers.