Pentium 4 2.6Ghz not working.. Help!!

My office lab has a LC server that runs a Dell GX270 (2.6Ghz P4) with 2GB of ram... for some reason.. it just shuts down for no apparent reason.. The guys from my lab called me up and when I had it to restart, it just says "Thermal Excess Problem Causing Automatic Shutdown"...

I'm guessing the 2.6Ghz P4 pretty much cooked.. but it still post... just not into windows... I wrenched the chassis open, the passive cooler was well... I'm no expert in P4.. but its not THAT hot that needed a shutdown. My A64 had headsinks hotter than that.. Yes, the duct fan was working.. and the RAM was pretty cool.

Any ideas guys?

probablity of PSU fan failure with those has been known to be quite high, is the nvidia style fan on the psu working correctly? Btw, the GX270 is NOT passively cooled...there could lie the problem lol

Well.. I'm no pro for Intel stuff.. Its just big aluminium block with a green duct stuck on top of it.. there an exhaust fan thats like 2cm away from the passive block.. The power supply is working fine...

I dropped into the BIOS (pressing F2 when posting).. and made the processor run 'Compatible' speed rather than 'Normal' speed... it boots into window fine now... but well... lets just say 10 minutes is a little long.. even for a legacy 500Mhz processor. (And Dell's bios is NOT HELPFUL)

well the 15 GX270's I have sitting in a pile here are all cooled witha cooler and flat black fan, maybe speak to dell and see if they will send you this upgraded HSF?

Matt.

Well... We called Dell... But we din really got this rig from Dell directly, instead we got it together with the LC equipment... Lets just say the warranty's off... And the HSF is not that hot to begin with... and I just dropped by again in the lab and restarted... the HSF was well... 20C air-conditioned temperature (feel)... and it still wont load windows.

Perhaps this is your problem?

thanks rave... well... We've called the LC company.. looks like its another £100 an hour engineering work... this is going to hurt....