0Problemi di stabilità

Ho riscontrato alcuni problemi di stabilità con il mio HTPC recentemente. Una reinstallazione non ha aiutato, quindi ho concluso che si trattava di hardware. Anche la rimozione di tutti gli elementi non essenziali non ha aiutato, quindi ho pensato che dovesse esserlo CPU, memoria o relativi a mobo. Niente è overcloccato o ottimizzato ed è tutto un kit di marca abbastanza recente. Sottolineo il test CPU e la memoria senza causare il fallimento di nessuno dei due, ma ho continuato a ottenere blocchi occasionali e prestazioni lente intermittenti.

Now because this is a htpc, it is in a smallish case with low air­flow. It has 2 120mm fans but they’re con­trolled based on CPU temp and are usu­ally off due to low CPU usage com­bined with the huge Scythe Ninja heat­sink. I knew the CPU was­n’t over­heat­ing but thought i’d check the gpu (A pass­ive Radeon 5450) and hdd, which is in a sus­pen­sion mount­ing which reduces the cool­ing it receives.

How­ever both hdd and gpu were barely luke­warm. In the pro­cess I happened to catch my hand on the fairly sub­stan­tial chip­set heat­sink (labelled “giga­byte” in the photo below). Ahia! I had­n’t real­ised that even with the sub­stan­tial cool­er the chip­set required or expec­ted some act­ive cool­ing from the nearby CPU sock­et. I don’t have a fan dir­ectly on the CPU heat­sink (as you can see below) and the air­flow over the chip­set clearly was­n’t suf­fi­cient. Ori­gin­ally I had the fans arranged blow­ing air out of the case, but decided to try a small rearrange­ment — revers­ing them and frac­tion­ally increas­ing their min­im­um speed. Pos­it­ive case pres­sure is gen­er­ally good prac­tice qualsiasi-modo, and this way air is forced past the heat­sink to exit the case. This small change seems to have done the trick.
Mor­al of the story: some recent(ish) chip­sets (e.g. Intel series 4 chip­sets) require reas­on­able air­flow (or a heat­sink upgrade — e.g. the Thermal­right HR-05 which is now on my shop­ping list).  It may also be a good idea to upgrade the thermal goop sup­plied with a high qual­ity com­pound. I recom­mend IC 7 Dia­mond if you can’t.
One final note — in my case the com­pan­ion south­bridge, with a tiny “heat­sink”, (cen­ter bot­tom of image) was only medi­um-warm and clearly does­n’t require any changes.