Great write up. However, these copper pipe type coolers don’t fail unless you’ve busted the fan somehow. For those of you with this overheating problem, just take it apart and put new thermal paste in there.

My 6yr old machine was overheating badly, and would BSOD on occasion. A quick look with hwinfo revealed a cpu that was hitting 100°C.

Too hot!

I blew in the vents with some light compressed air and this blew out a small slug of lint.

Didn’t help much.

Ran Aida64 FPU and it would immediately overheat and throttle

I went by the pics on here and knew that my fan was operating normally so I figured I’d try new paste before dropping $50+ on a new fan.

Pulled the heatsinks out, put some new Artic Silver on there and put it back together.

Now even under Aida64 FPU it’s only hitting 93°C now and no throttling.