Is my CPU overheating?

Reedwrite wrote on 3/18/2004, 8:16 AM

I'm trying to burn a DVD and it does everything up to about 15 minutes into the burning phase and then I get IOCTL error. I have a Pacific Digital 8x DVD, GeForce 4 Ti, P4 2.4, 2G 333 DDR. I have the same problem with all software and I'm thinking perhaps my processor is overheating. I can burn a shorter DVD just fine.

Comments

ScottW wrote on 3/18/2004, 8:40 AM

I'm not sure I understand what you mean by you have the same problem with all software; all burner software?

If you had an issue with CPU overheating, it would be much more likely to show up during the render process than during the burning process - rendering is much more CPU intensive than burning. I ran into this once with an AMD processor I had - they run hot to begin with, but once I started a render the processor temp would climb and I'd eventually get the blue screen of death. Cleaning the dust bunnies off the processor heat sink and fan solved that problem.

I think I'd be more likely to suspect that your DVD burner is overheating. If you've got the drive wedged in next to other devices that generate lots of heat (like a disk drive), see if you can move things around to open things up. If you don't have a case fan that's seperate from the one in your power supply, adding a case fan might help as well. My burner has some vent slots on the front - if yours has something similar, make sure that they aren't blocked (if you have a case door that closes over the burner, make sure you leave the case door open when burning).

--Scott

johnmeyer wrote on 3/18/2004, 9:17 AM

Your BIOS may give you the CPU temperature. I was just trying to troubleshoot a major problem in DVDA and, at the advice of Sony's tech support, updated my BIOS. While I was in the BIOS after the update, to make sure none of the settings had changed, I noticed a section that provides both voltage and temperature information. FWIW, my CPU temp was 40 degrees C.

BillyBoy wrote on 3/18/2004, 11:51 AM

I doubt its overheating from burning a DVD. Try the simple hand test. While your computer is doing something intensive, put you hand next to the exhaust where the case vents. Does it really feel warm? If only slightly or not at all, not very likely you're overheating.

Could be the DVD burner, or bad media. Do you get any error messages? Every time I got a bad CD or DVD burn the software or hardware reported some gofoy cryptic error code. If it includes the words can't blah, blah, blah write to such and such, suspect the media.

A nice web page that lists lots of Computer Acronyms.

http://www.geocities.com/ikind_babel/babel/babel.html

Reedwrite wrote on 3/19/2004, 4:54 PM

I figured it out. It was that I didn't have the DMA set right. After I changed it. Voila! It worked great! A little tricky in Win 2000.

johnmeyer wrote on 3/19/2004, 6:02 PM

Thanks for posting the solution. I sure hope Sony tech support monitors these forums and puts answers like yours into their database.