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General Software Discussion / Re: No video after resuming from sleep - Windows 10 Anniversary Edition
« Last post by IainB on September 05, 2016, 01:25 PM »Failing fans on GPUs is quite common where I live. Subtropical ambient temperatures and often humid...that doesn't help with longevity of fans. That is to say, GPU fans. Case fans are much "sturdier" in my experience and if you don't care much about the looks of the GPU inside your case, then try to fit a case fan onto the heatsink of the GPU.I just had a thought about that - overworked PC fans.
Fugly, but your GPU is getting lots of cooling and depending on the model case fan, it can be a very quiet solution. Even if you cannot mount a case fan directly, putting an extra case fan as close as possible to the GPU also works quite well. Especially if you can make some sort of funnel to pull the heat from the GPU. Case fans are much easier to replace or maintain and usually cost much less than a new GPU.
___________________________-Shades (September 05, 2016, 12:44 AM)
I'm not trying to teach my grandmother to suck eggs here, but I wondered whether some experiential tips/thoughts that have served me well might also be useful to others.
Humidity helps for cooling:
- In theory, pushing a flow of humid air over the object to be cooled will actually improve the cooling effect. An example of this in practice is as demonstrated by the use of canvas water bags you could buy in the US to place in front of a car's heat-exchanger/radiator (thus obstructing airflow!) when driving through a hot desert region. They worked surprisingly well.
- Similarly, when I was using an HP ENVY-14, which used to get a bit hot in summer (it used an Intel i7 chip in a small laptop enclosure), I would have a plastic tray or something on my lap, with a dampened cloth laid out flat and the laptop on top of that with an eraser lifting up either the back or the front (to enable good airflow). When I did this with an already-running and overheated laptop, the temps would drop noticeably within 30 seconds of setting this up, and stay there. Very effective. I wrote about this in a post on the DC forum.
The fans may be defeated from having any effect:
- This would be true, for example, if (say) the airflow of the fan exhaust through the heat exchanger grill was blocked with fluff/dust. This is typically what happens with laptop fans, because the interstices in the heat exchanger grill are relatively small and thus potentially more easily blocked by even small particles accumulating during usage (over time).
- I'm not sure whether this might be relevant to the same extent in a PC's heat exchanger (heatsink fins).
The waste heat may not be getting to the heat exchanger:
- If the CPU or GPU in question was apparently working fine and running sufficiently cool when it was new, but now is overheating and failing to work properly, then, if the airflow over the heat exchanger (typically a finned heatsink) is unobstructed, it may be just a symptom of overheating because the path for conducting heat away from the chip is broken.
- The heatsink - usually a piece of copper in a laptop, not sure what it is in a PC - is touching the chip, with a special heat-conducting "thermal" grease sandwiched between the face of the chip and the face of the heatsink. The grease makes up for any uneveness of the two surface areas in contact, maximising the potential for heat transfer.
- A few years ago I was using a Toshiba Satellite A100 laptop that started to progressively overheat, the fan running a lot, etc. I did the obvious - cleaned out the heat exchanger - which only improved things marginally. So I bought some of the thermal grease, removed the heatsink, cleaned the faces of the chips and heatsink where they met, smeared on a dab of the thermal grease to the chip faces, and bolted it all back together, taking care not to over-tighten things.
Problem solved. Laptop ran just like new and with no more "over-heating" problems. So I think that what had happened was that the grease had deteriorated in its quality of thermal conductivity, and thus had ceased to perform its job. What tipped me off to this fixit was my having read about overheating fixes on a forum that specialised in graphic chip technology and drivers. I forget it's name, but I might be able to dig it up from the archives if anybody wants it. At the time, I recall that I was using a GPU controller app that they had produced, which performed better than the GPU manufacturer's (AMD's) own software!
SpeedFan is very useful, but...:
- The thing about SpeedFan is that it will look for and try to access the various heat sensors in the CPU/GPU/HDD chips. It cannot therefore "see" any problems downstream in the heat-flow from the chip itself, so one would probably tend to intuitively assume that fan symptoms of overheating would usually mean that the fan was the problem. The fan is turned on/off by the sensors. Similarly, the operation of the CPU/GPU chips will be automatically suspended when these sensor temps reach certain critical thresholds. This may be what has happened in this case. Repeated/excessive overheating of chips can apparently permanently damage them. I don't know whether this will have happened in this case.
Conclusion:
So what I would suggest is, if you haven't done so already, then replace the thermal grease on those chips (or whatever they use in the PC hardware heatsink interfaces), as described above. This will remove one possible cause. After that, if the airflows are clean, the fans are in good order, yet the chips don't perform like they should, then - whatever the cause - they are probably permanently damaged and they will need to be replaced. To test this hypothesis, try replacing them with any old (working) spare you might have access to, and see if that eliminates the problem.
The fan systems will also need to be inspected/maintained, as they will have probably been operating outside of their normal performance range for extended intervals. This may have caused some mechanical wear and tear.
