CPU Temperature High Overheat

Recently I was hit by something I totally did not expect. My CPU temperature hit 90C. That's in fact way too high under any sort of environment and potentially could burn your CPU. It really puzzles me, because I have a Antec H650 Liquid Cooling system which normally would never even let my CPU goes beyond 60C with full load. Anyway, ever wonder what is your heat, you can always check it with the good old BIOS like this:

Well it might looks better in the new generation BIOS like this :

Well mine was not flagged by the BIOS, but by Asus's utility. This was one time it was fortunate that I did as I could have prevented a fire. So it makes perfect sense to install them even though they do nothing much and basically is used for show off mostly... :)

Anyway, but to the problem. What happened? Well, after cold starting it with a few hours of rest, I can see the temperature going up steadily in the BIOS. This proves something. The temperature probe is likely not damage. It does record the cold starting temperature. It is not likely a software issue, since its in the BIOS before everything starts up.

So I have to take out the CPU connector to the Antec H650. It turns out that this was reused twice from other PC... So the thermal paste has harden for some reason or simply because I did not reapply more when switching PCs... Anyway luckily I bought some from Taobao just for rainy days (and it rained today) and there it goes. My PC is back at 40C. Phew... But guess what? I had already purchase upgrades for her! Well, guess I can still sell the perfectly working Gen 4 I5 away when my B150-I3 comes...

Asus Xonar Drivers for Windows 10

For a long while, Asus did not have the drivers for Windows 10 for their Xonar range of soundcard and somewhere in the end of last year, it seems they finally rolled out the Windows 10 soundcard drivers. Those of you who make do with the Unified drivers can finally upgrade to the official drivers if you want to.

Go find your card and download the latest drivers from there :
https://www.asus.com/Sound-Cards/

Britannica Upgrading to Vista

Finally I had enough of running the trial on the old hardware on Britannica. Its time for an upgrade and that includes these parts :

1. Motherboard (478 to 775)
2. CPU (P4HT to Core2Duo)
3. RAM (DDR to DDR2)
4. Graphics (AGP GeForce 6600GT to PCI-X GeForce 7900GS)

So that ends up me with the following hardware :

1. Asus P5B-VM
2. Core 2 Duo 6400
3. Kingston 2x1GB DDR2 667
4. Leadtek PX 7900GS

Well, how does it fair? Fantastic. I just need to get some time to run benchmarks. BTW, does benchmarks works in Vista? Hehe, I got a Vista benchmark of 5.1 now!

PC RAM : 1GB vs 1.5GB vs 2GB

And I thought there is no significant gain in performance. How wrong I was.

I had 2x256MB+2x512MB=1.5GB on Alphonso when I had the ASUS board (which is in RMA, 2 month liao, I will make sure heads roll for this). Then I had no choice but to buy a MSI ATI board since its cheap. That board only managed to take in my 2x512MB=1GB. As soon as I had that, I realized how slow things had became and even though its a fresh installation (thanks to motherboard change). I had lived with that for like... oh, yes, good guess 2 months.

Now, I just got myself 2x1GB=2GB RAM and plug in it. Wont co-exist with the 2x512MB, so I had to pull them out. Now, 2GB. Yes, Yes, Yes... Things are back to normal and actualyl even smoother. So, if anyone wants to tell me that that 512MB doesn't make the difference, I will let certainly show him the way out through the window. :)