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MBM seems to be more accurate than Asus Probe but is more difficult to set up. Either one will be fine to find out if your problem is heat.
If overheating does turn out to be the problem the quick and easy solution is to leave the cover off your computer.
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My case has about three fans (not including the CPU and PSU fans) and I've read the proper airflow (and cleanliness) is dependent upon the case being closed. Inside the case the machine is clean with the round SATA cables and optional round cables for the optical drives nicely tied down.
I've got the machine working well again but it's only been two days. One of the big fixes was going back three revs from the latest BIOS (which was still newer than my original BIOS). To get the BIOS flashed properly I used a DOS boot disk with the latest Asus AFUDOS utility. The method using alt-F2 on normal bootup with a non bootable floppy seemed to have problems getting back to bootup and BIOS checksum errors. I also reset the power connectors and cleaned the fans and inside using a spray duster and anti-static vacume. Both of these fixes were mentioned by others in the various hardware forums.
When I started to have the problem with shutdown a few months ago the symptoms were weird. Generally the system would boot up OK and about ten minutes later would shutdown. It would come back up OK and then run fine even if I was datamining twelve tables all day. Other times just the display would shut down and I had to reboot (to eliminate Windows XP problems the Win XP power save video and hard disk shutdown options were turned off).
I'm guessing here now but I wonder if a CPU or other important fan wasn't coming on during startup but would on a second try. MBM properly set up should help me here.
Anyway it stopped doing this for a while after I cleaned it about six weeks ago. Eventually it started shuting down again and then more often and wouldn't come back up unless I turned off the power supply and disconnected the power cable for a while before trying again. One day it wouldn't come on at all until I disconected all cables (could a USB device by loading something down?) Then the primary hard disk went bad until I used Maxtor's PowerMax to restore it.
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Reseating the CPU may help if the thermal paste has dried out or lost contact ... no real need for high-end Arctic Silver type stuff, the thermal paste from Radio Shack works fine ... just be sure to do a good job of removing the old stuff.
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The overclocker and hardware forums (there are tons of them) seemed to point at cold flow problems with solder on a similar Asus MB and seating problems.
Because the system usually shut down during the first ten minutes I wonder if overheating due to poor seating is/was the problem (IOW wouldn't it be more likely under stress?). But if this acts up again I may give it a whirl although I'm clumsy and would have to look up the procedure. If I'm going to take the time to do this I'd use the best thermal paste I can find (on a similar note I never understood why someone would take the time to paint a room using anything but top end paint or knit a sweater with anything but very good yarn). BTW, just Googled Artic Silver, it's about five bucks!
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A better
heatsink is the final solution.
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I'll look at this. Hopefully installing it doesn't involve soldering; that MB is screwed if it does. [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]
Thanks for your help.
~ Rick
PS MBM only has default things running and I only have 4% CPU usage right now (per task manager) but by CPU is at 102 degrees F and my case is 80 degrees F. This seems low to my uneducated eye but it would be interesting to find out how it does under a stress test (note to me: need to look up some good stressing utility).
PPS Also did Memtest86 ver 3.2 from a floppy and it ran for about four hours (maybe 20 or so cycles of the complete set of tests) without an error.