Intel Atom overheating in ASUS EEE Box 1501P
- by Sergey L.
I have had an ASUS EEE Box 1501P for just a little bit over a year. Of course it breaks 2 months after the warranty runs out.
http://www.asus.com/Eee/EeeBox_PC/EeeBox_PC_EB1501P/
I have been using the box as a Home Media Center. Running mostly 24/7 often pausing a video overnight.
Since last week the fan started running extremely loud. After some digging I found that the Intel Atom CPU in it is overheating and the built-in sensor is reporting temperatures way over 105°C.
This got me worried, so I took the unit apart. Completely vacuumed the heat sink, oiled the fan, but the unit is still showing the same behaviour. After turning it on and just observing the hardware monitor in the BIOS the temperature slowly rises from 40°C to over 95°C in appx 5 min.
I am running the newest BIOS and a lightweight Linux OPENELEC OS with XBMC on it.
Now I am wondering if it could be a faulty heat sensor in the Atom. Recommended running temperature is up to 85°C, but I have not detected any performance hits when running at the above mentioned 105°C and there seem to be no software faults.
How can an Atom with an attached heat sink and a fan running at full capacity even get this hot in the first place at 0 load? Aren't those things designed to generate virtually no heat?
Could it be a faulty heat sensor? What shall I try to fix this? I would prefer not to damage the CPU, since it is hard fused into the motherboard and cannot be replaced.
I could remove the heat pipe/heat sink, but it is getting hot, so heat is properly transferring from the CPU to the heat pipe, the fan is running at full capacity, is recently oiled and warm air is making it out of the exhaust.
Edit:
One more note: The North-bridge (or whatever it is called nowadays) is on the same heat pipe.
