Hi guys. Just had a customer in this morning, who purchased a dual core from me some time ago. Rather than get me to build him a Quad Core for his daughter, she persuaded him to buy one from PC World.

He purchased a nice system which did not come with speakers or printer, so he purchased those as well from them - total cost £820.00.

Since he bought it, he has been back to PC World several times & from what he has been telling me, he is not happy with their customer service.

The problem is that his daughter has been running the rig extensively & every so often, it freezes - no mouse or KB activity & only a reboot works, & that only for a short period. She did tell me that after leaving rig off for an hour or more, it restarts with no problem. With my experience of my quad, I came to the conclusion that it was heat related & requested to look at their system.

The case is very cramped which is expected from HP. It's a HP Pavillion Slimline with a Phenom 9100E (1.8ghz). as it stands, the only way that I can see to remedy the problem is to reinstall everything into a better case so that sufficient cooling can be applied.

He was quite prepared to accept this, except that I refused to do it as it would invalidate his warranty. To cap it all off, I showed him a complete multimedia system which includes an all-in-one printer for a total price of £510.00 - HE wasn't very happy. The difference between the 2 was that his came with a 20" monitor whereas mine was only 17" & the cpu was a 9950.

Has anyone bought a retail quad & experienced heat/cooling problems due to insufficient space/fans?

I have had an opposite experience... I baught a dell XPS 420 with a Q9300 and have found dell did an excellent job. There cooling solution involves placing the CPU near the front of the PC, with a large heat sink and a fan air guide installed over the heatsink. At the front Fresh air is drawn in from a large (120mm I believe) fan over this heatsink. I have not had any issues, and run all 4 cores to 100% 24/7.

Excellent a computer builder, I am thinking of doing my 2'nd build. The first was quite some time ago. I want to do a good computer for the front room, for the tv and games. I was thinking like a buddy of mine( He went way out of control) sli, 3 gtx 280's,1000W power, blu ray burner, ddr3(not sure what the dif is), and his case is so cool it has lights and fans everywhere with a little tv on the front. Where does a guy start to even do something like that???????????? And I got to get it past the wife, so the zillion bucks is out of the question. Any wisdom would be great. Thanks.

There are several factors involved with cooling. One of the biggest is the room temperature that the computer is in. If the room is warm, the box gets warm air, it doesn't cool very well.

Run a program that pulls the temperature from the various components. I generally use Hardware Monitor - www.cpuid.com/hwmonitor.php

Typically, temperatures reaching 75c are warm 85c is hot, 95c is critcal... My laptop peaks around 70 for the CPU cores, 85c for it's video card but still runs stable.

Have you check the phorums on this. Look more like a software problame and not a heat isue.

All those lights and fans may look cool but after a couple of weeks of trying watch TV you'll want to take a hammer to them.

Hi Philze, when I changed the cpu from a X2 5000 to X2 6000 in Andrea's rig, I was amazed at it's quietness. The only difference between the 2 coolers was that the 6000 had copper pipes. It's also connected to the TV & when watching films/music videos, I've found it very good & what little sound coming from the rig does not affect us watching them.

Rig specs:

AMD X2 6000 (3.0ghz) £66.00
2x 2gb PC6400 £40.00
Geoforce 8500GT (512mb) £60.00
2x 250gb HD's £65.00
480w PSU £20.00
EQS AB1S-RS690MKM M-ATX Mobo (found them to be pretty good mobo's, so bought another 3) £40.00
Vista Business £85.00
Jeantech Titan Case £25.00

Total £401.00 ($800Can - CER)

Info from several forums says that a 3.0ghz cpu is needed, but not sure about this as we've often used the 5000 to view films & noticed no problems. Also, many have said that using rig as a HTPC with Boinc running affects the films - I've found no problem so far with leaving boinc running.

Checked out the software - Asides from Vista Home Premium, just has MP11, MS Office, Roxio, Norton.

He has taken rig back to PC World to have them check it out & stated that should they not find the problem, will go ahead with getting bigger case with better cooling. Also queried the cpu - didn't know that there was a Phenom 9100 available - Must be for OEM's only, because I couldn't find it available retail.

Hey Sirius check this out
The chipset maybe FUBAR




http://www.pcpro.co.uk/news/230097/has-nvidia-problem-hit-hp-desktops.html
Affect models
http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/document?docname=c01514044&cc=us&%20dlc=en&lc=en&jumpid=reg_R1002_USEN

Sorry Hardware and not software. I knew it's was not heat that was the cause.

Great, thanks Frank, much appreciated. It's not exactly the problem their having, but it does prove that there is something wrong with the system. Have copied this to them so that they can return to PC World & quote the Sale of Goods Act to them - He may demand a full refund as it is not of merchandisable quality, in which case, he will get one from me - Hope I can persuade him to install boinc (Under my account of course).

Not so sure JPLiz, this is a similar problem I was having on my quad & that was heat related. As soon as I upgraded the cooling, problem disappeared, but as Frank has shown, there is an inherent fault on the system. Hopefully he can get PC World to sort it out one way or another.