Thread: How to solve Heat Sink issue

I have a heatsink that is wearing out (Foxconn) so i bought a new one off of ebay from ebay sites-Pentium-4-socket-478-CPU-heat-sinkfan-clipspaste_W0QQitemZ250482702072QQcmdZViewItemQQpt ZLH_DefaultDomain_0? Hash=item3a51eeb6f8&_trksid=p3286.c0.m14

Waited 4 days and it came in. I then installed it and the computer ran fine till it went through 2 seconds of windows and then shut down. i started it back up and then it did some beep where it was one higher pitch then a lower pitch twice. The Bios loaded up and said the CPU overheated but before I could press f4 to continue it shuts down again! so i assumed its the heatsink that’s defective. Send it back exchanged it and tried it. Same exact thing! So i put back the old foxconn to see if it works. It did so that was puzzling. Found another (Name brand-Masscool) and tried that. it did the same thing and shut off. So my sudden curiosity was to put back the foxconn and it still worked. I have a Intel Desktop D875PBZ with a socket 478 3.0 GHz HT northwood processor, 2gb memory, with nvidia bfg geforce 5500 graphics card (PCI), a sound blaster live sb0410 (PCI), two case fans and a 580watt power supply. Anyone have any ideas?

Thermal paste.
Did you clean off the cpu and the heatsink mating surface with alcohol and apply fresh paste to them?

Its works thank you so much and now i have my computer running again. I guess it was from not putting sufficient thermal grease.

You should only need to use a small amount.

I typically clean down the chip and heatsink with isopropyl alcohol wipes.

Then I do 4 very small beads in the corners, and 1 in the middle. Then I use a single edge razor and gently smooth the beads to cover the surface, increasing force as I go along.

Giving the chip surface a thin but even coating has been most efficient for me - I have been using Arctic silver 5 for the past few years but have recently switched to arctic silver ceramique with similar results (testing to see its endurance). Although, I still recommend AS5 as the tried and true thermal compound.