is 1 of my cores broken?

[jonathan]

ive had this laptop for a few years (didnt buy it from you hope thats not a problem :S)

and for like 6 months to a year its been getting very hot. i downloaded EVEREST home edition and see that 1 of my cpu's is at 100% and the other is at 0% does that meen 1 is broken?

 

[Gorman]

Hi Bud, not definately. Everest may not be compatible with the chip / bios and or whatever software is running isnt maxing out all cores.

try running prime 95 and see what everest says about it then

 

[jonathan]

oh prime 95! yeah remind me what that is again

oh wow! my core temps are core #0 93.C core #1 90.C that cant be good

 

[Gorman]

hehe, its a program designed to hunt for prime numbers. off shoot is it has a stress test that calculates....lots and checks the answers your machine comes up with against a known good set. It does this for each core / thread availiable.

As your cpu is in essence a calculator if the sums come up wrong you have a hardware error.

x86 and x64 versions availiable here http://www.mersenne.org/freesoft/

 

[jonathan]

when i try to download it, it says cannot be opened because an unknown error has occured

 

[Gorman]

32 or 64 bit?

 

[jonathan]

tried both im on a 32 bit

 

[jonathan]

aha! ok now ive done it... stupid thing was trying to open it with mozzilla firefox instead of winRar :S


now what the heck do i do with it

 

[Gorman]

http://mersenneforum.org/gimps/p95v2511.zip ?

 

[Gorman]

right, unzip and run the exe, select just stress testing and post how many cores it shows, when its running note down if it fails on any core and or crashes your machine

 

[jonathan]

crashed while i was doing it :/

 

[Gorman]

Ok well thats indicative of a core hardware fault CPU/RAM/MOBO tied in with the Everest reading of an idle core its most likely your cpu. I bet its AMD?

 

[jonathan]

yeah :/ AMD Athlon(tm) 64 X2 Dual-Core Processor TK-57 how you know all that from those images i'll never know

 

[Gorman]

well its had its day that laptop, what make? Acer?

 

[jonathan]

nah toshiba! suprising it hasnt melted by now! is it a repairable problem? or is it not even worth the hassle

 

[Gorman]

Toshiba, really? im shocked. You can always ebay a cpu for it although i cant guarantee that is the duff component, just an educated guess. Personally i would leave it, does it work or is it crashing etc?

 

[jonathan]

it works really well for the state its in achually just alot slower than my liking and gets extremely hot as i said 90C! the computer u guys built me as at 33C

 

[Gorman]

well i would leave it, maybe carefully open it up to clear any dust from vents and if your feeling brave put some fresh TIM on the cpu

 

[jonathan]

man u gota stop with those computer words! what the heck is TIM

 

[Gorman]

sorry, Thermail Interface Material. Thermal paste, grease, pidgeon poo. You guys ask me a question and put me in geek mode, no one to blame but yourselves!