I recently retired my old media center PC with an i5-2500k that I had been using successfully with a Thermalright TA120 cooler for years. I decided to reuse the cooler on my new PC that has an i5-8400, which was originally running fine on the stock Intel cooler, though it can get pretty noisy when it ramps up. After carefully swapping over the TA120—cleaning off the old thermal paste and applying new paste—I ran some stress tests and it worked fine initially. However, a few minutes later while just browsing the internet, the system froze, went to a black screen, then rebooted. It ended up giving a bluescreen about a corrupted Windows installation and started POST looping without even getting to startup. I checked the cooler and the thermal paste applied evenly, but reinstalling the stock cooler allowed everything to boot normally. I'm confused about how this could happen. Could the TA120 have gone bad?
1 Answer
It might be a mounting pressure issue. If the cooler isn’t making even contact with the CPU, it could lead to overheating or instability. Check that all screws are tightened evenly and consider whether the cooler’s mount could be causing some contact problems with the socket pins.
Ahh, that makes sense thanks.