help it's about to melt!

cosgrove80

I've just installed MBM and it says my case temp is 75 degrees C!

Problem is I'm not sure what motherboard I have.

It says KT400-ALH on it which I know are made by a few people.

It's also got a VIA VT8235 chip on it.

Does this mean it's def a VIA motherboard?

Why is it 75 degrees anyway?!

I've got

athlon xp 2800+

1,521 MB 333 ram

As you can guess I'm not used to opening my comp.

Please help!

joePC

Go into BIOS (Press Del @ startup) and check temps there,
if the case is 75C then the CPU would be past 100+ therfore the temp is wrong.

Thanks joePC

Verdammt

Get the bacon out. Could make a stylish BBQ.

magick

put an exhust fan at the back of it , always helps the temps

secret_squirrel

doesnt MBM read in fahrenheit by default? maybe thats the problem?

unkel

Originally posted by cosgrove80
I've just installed MBM and it says my case temp is 75 degrees C!

A case temp of 75 degrees is very unlikely when your system is still running

It might refer to the northbridge chipset temp. 75 degrees is not all that hot for some motherboards under load

cosgrove80

Yeah I may have overreacted a little. Sorry about that.
There were alarms going off, they wouldn't stop, it's been a long day, I panicked, lashed off a post to the boards and turned it off.

I checked the temp at startup (thanks joePC) and the CPU temp was 46/47°C which is a lot less scary.

I have a Thermaltake Volcano fan on the cpu at the moment.

I've just ordered a radeon 9800 so I suppose I should look into some more cooling stuff just to be on the safe side.

Thanks for all the replies. Any other tips are welcome though.

unkel

So what bit of hardware was the 75 degrees referring to?

netman

You probably don't have it set up correctly and it's reading wrong temperatures.

Check what hardware monitoring your motherboard has, and set up MBM accordingly.

If the case temp was 75C it would have set the whole house on fire!

cosgrove80

I don't have the motherboard CD and I can't find out exactly what motherboard I have.

I think it's a VIA KT400-ALH but I don't see that on the MBM list.
I searched for the FCC number on motherboards.org but I couldn't find it

It's defenitely got a VT8235 south bridge but other than that I'm not sure.

I'm really showing my ignorance on this thread:dunno:

It said the 75C was for the case. No idea what itwas really for.

I've uninstalled MBM now

Inspector Gadget

Hmm...

The two most common locations for motherboard model numbers to be printed are:

1) Between two of the expansion slots (PCI/AGP) - sockets that look like square lumps of plastic (about 1cmX10cm), usually there are a few of white ones (PCI), one brown one set further towards the centre of the board (AGP). Look for a short sequence of letters and numbers (probably including hyphens '-' and perhaps slashes '/') written in large (~1cm tall) text (quite often this text will be white in colour) between any two of these sockets.
2) On a BIOS chip. If you look at the board, you'll probably find a small black chip surrounded by a brown socket - this usually has a sticker on it with the motherboard name and BIOS revision on it. It should look like this (though the hologram sticker is strictly optional, and the example I googled up doesn't give away the information I'd hope for )

Because you mentioned KT400 above (the name of a VIA chipset), I'm guessing it's a relatively recent board - however, VIA themselves don't really produce motherboards (except for the tiny - but cool - Mini-ITX stuff) - instead, they make chipsets for other manufacturers to build motherboards around. The VT8235 chip you mention is has been used in KT266 and KT400 chipsets, but that doesn't tell us a whole lot about the board. See what you can find.

Some motherboard manufacturers don't actually admit to having built their motherboards - I've seen some I've later identified as having come from ECS (Pc Chips) that don't actually have their model numbers or brands anywhere on the board!

Hope this helps,
Gadget

cosgrove80

Thanks for all the info Inspector Gadget. V useful.

I'll open the case shortly and have a look.

I think I found the mobo though.

It's made bt AZZA afaik. Never heard of them though

http://www.azzaboard.com/kt400alh.html

I can't find them listed on MBM though.

netman

Erm, excuse my ignorance, VIA might be different, I generally lean towards Intel and Nvidia chipsets, but north and south bridges are used for interfaces to memory, agp, pci bus etc.

Monitoring of temperatures and voltages is generally not done by either one of the bridges. Usually you have a hardware monitor chip, and most commonly it's made by winbond.

Actually, on the web page you mentioned, it lists winbond W83697HF (they have it misspelt by the way) hardware monitoring. Look for that chip in MBM, or even better download Winbond Hardware Doctor. If you need to set it up anywhere, pick the correct chip and off you go. You can double check the readings by going into the BIOS and making sure it shows pretty much the same temps there.

Inspector Gadget

netman:
As far as I know, you're right, in so far as that Via chipsets are not that different to any other brand, as far as general layout goes, but AFAIK the VT8235 mentioned above has the necessary bits required to perform temperature monitoring (apart from thermal diodes, which obviously require strategic location) - its earlier brother the VT8233 (otherwise referred to sometimes as the 686B) certainly does...

(Actually, it's listed as one of the supported chips for the Linux lm_78 hardware monitoring package, so it must be)

Manufacturers can opt to use these or add third-party hardware monitoring from the likes of Winbond, Maxim etc. I seem to remember Asus had their own custom monitoring hardware - don't know offhand if they're still using it on more modern boards, but it wouldn't surprise me.

If between yourself and cosgrove80 you have succeeded in identifying the motherboard and the hardware monitor on it, you should be able to set up MBM manually with some fiddling about, and if you do, submit your results back to Mr. Van Kaam at MBM so that the list of supported motherboards will include that one (which, if I'm honest, I've never heard of) next time

cosgrove80: Also, just in case you haven't tried this, recent versions of MBM include a "LiveUpdate"-type feature to download the most recent motherboard support list - have you tried this in case your machine is in the new list? (I doubt it as the chipset on your board is two generations behind VIA's current offerings, but it's no harm to try...)

Gadget

secret_squirrel

if you dont have any luck with MBM try Speedfan, the temp monitoring is really easy to set up (more so than MBM) Then later you can really start fiddling and start controlling your fans.....

cosgrove80

"Inspector" I tried the liveupdate on MBM but the mobo still didn't come up.

I installed Speedfan. I didn't change any settings, just ran the prog and got the following

Temp2:52°C
Temp1:-47°C
HDO:39°C

Fan01:3750 RPM
Fan02:0 RPM

quarryman

for the fan problem its likely that it doesn't have an RPM (3rd) wire. you can control the speed of the fan but not view its rpm.

is that a typo with the -47? if not its prob caused by speedfan using the wrong chip to detect the temp. see if there is an option to alternate between diode and well, non-diode for the winbond temp sensor.

Inspector Gadget

Interesting... I think the best option is to tell the MBM installer a white lie to get it running correctly.

If you tell it during the install that your motherboard is one that's on its list (but happens to have the same Winbond hardware monitor chip, oh, say, any MSI KT3 board you see in the list), then it might just work straight away.

If not, you should be able to tinker with the options in the Settings window (if you can't see it, right-click on the MBM system tray icon and select "Settings") to figure out which temperature is which (the CPU temp will invariably be higher than the system temperature, which should be in or around the ambient temp of the room - i.e. 30C or less at the moment unless you live in a furnace)

The next trick is to identify which fan is which. If your board has a passively cooled northbridge (which I can't confirm from the photo at the URL below as it doesn't seem to have *any* heatsink in the picture!), you can plug out every fan EXCEPT THE CPU FAN - at least on a short-term basis - and check which sensor is reporting a non-zero speed.

(If you run your computer with the CPU fan unplugged (unless you're using a very exotic passive sink or watercooling) the effects may not be pretty!)

If your motherboard has a fan-cooled northbridge (the northbridge will probably be the biggest chip on the motherboard, and definitely the closest large chip to the CPU socket), then check how many wires lead from that fan - two means no speed reporting, so act as above, three means it's got speed monitoring. In this case, set up the two sensors (I call mine "CPU" and "Northbridge") so that they're both detecting non-zero fan speeds, then bring up the dashboard display (by right-clicking on the system tray icon, and choosing "Dashboard"). Then, *carefully* press the centre disc of the northbridge fan with your finger (be careful of the blades - it'll hurt if you hit them) to stop its rotation for a couple of seconds, and watch which speed drops. As soon as you see the speed dip, let go of the fan again to prevent thermal damage. It's important NOT TO DO THIS FOR MORE THAN A FEW SECONDS.

(I should point out this is *anything but* recommended practice; this is get-me-out-of-a-hole McGyver-type stuff )

Then attach any other case fans one by one and try to match non-zero fan rotations to the appropriate fan locations, and label accordingly. Use the "Alarm" and "Visual" buttons to set any options you want, including low-RPM and high temperature warnings (can be useful!)

Hope this helps,
Gadget

secret_squirrel

Just a note to say gadgets advice will also work if you use speedfan - with the added bonus that you can use speedfan to reduce the fan speed to zero rather than your finger!

cosgrove80

Speedfan wont change the speed of the fans so I'm guessing theyre not connected properly (I'm not sticking my finger anywhere!).

Just like to say thanks to everyone who posted to try and help me. My comp is running ok so I'm going to leave well enough alone. Overclocking etc. isn't really my thing. I'll read a few guides to get started but I'll leave it to somebody else (my brother will be able to do something) to sort out.

Thanks again appreciate all the help.

jozi

did you find out what mobo it is?

sounds like it could be the same as my old mobo, xfx force kt-400 alh.

had trouble setting up mbm with it to, eventually gave u pon it.

jozi

Gerry

There is another method, if you look at the POST screen,
you will see a big string of numbers and letters down the bottom, google that or fire it into the mobo id search yoke on motherboards.org ( I presume that you haven't confused this with FCC ID ).
If speedfan can't change the fan speed, it just means that the mobo manufacturer hasn't connected the pwm's in the hardware monitoring chip ( or the southbridge in via's case ), to the fans. I.e. they connected the monitoring pins, but then stopped due to laziness.