Am I missing something? Laptop turning off after 30 mins

[Adept PC Repair]

I have a Samsung np-350v here, it came in with no post.

I reflowed the pch and it then booted, though wouldn't detect any sata devices, so I just bought a new board for it.

New board installed, stress tested with furmark, prime95 and sent out.

It's come back to me with a problem that I can't diagnose.

I can run prime95, furmark and stress the cpu to its limit, (it's a core i3 with the gma graphics), no shutdowns at all. However:

If I cause the laptop to transfer alot of data, eg. Run a sequential hard drive read test, it will shut down after about 15 minutes. My initial thoughts are the pch chip must be bad on the new motherboard? There is nothing to cool the pch other than a silicone pad, which i've replaced to no avail. Any thoughts?

The total time the laptop is on always seems to be around 30 minutes before it turns off.

 

[Kitten Kong]

Power settings?

 

[GTP]

Is the cooling fan vent clear?

 

[ComputerRepairTech]

Nothing off about any of the temps? even hdd?

 

[Adept PC Repair]

All temps are fine, fan, heatsink clear of dust. Arctic silver on cpu. I can stress the machine to it's max with prime and furmark without anything happening, but a windows install would make it crash due to data transfer.

It's definitely not power settings or anything software related, it goes off as though overheating. My instinct says the pch is overheating, though this has no option to be cooled with the laptop's design and never was with the previous board.

 

[DataMedics]

Just to absolutely rule out anything software related, I'd still try booting it up to a Linux live CD/USB and see if the problem persists.

 

[Adept PC Repair]

This is a brand new windows 10 install done by the customer in an effort to correct the fault before calling me. I will boot in to Ubuntu now and check, though does anyone know of any decent hard drive testing tools in Ubuntu?

Also, I know probably rare, but would hard drive overheating cause this symptom? My guess is not, but I just wanted to get other's opinions.

 

[Easy PC]

Type in 'Disk' in the search bar of Linux and a disk program will show up - you select the disk you want to test - uses S.M.A.R.T and only take a few minutes - I would guess it could be a faulty drive - I did have an old desktop years ago, that would run ok, but when you tried to burn a dvd would freeze the pc - I replaced processor, ram and power supply...turned out to be a faulty motherboard - worked fine all the time until I tried to burn a disk - that pc is still floating about somewhere as my father gave it to someone!!

 

[DataMedics]

This is a brand new windows 10 install done by the customer in an effort to correct the fault before calling me. I will boot in to Ubuntu now and check, though does anyone know of any decent hard drive testing tools in Ubuntu?

Also, I know probably rare, but would hard drive overheating cause this symptom? My guess is not, but I just wanted to get other's opinions.

Heat doesn't tend to affect HDD's very much. However as Easy PC mentioned, a faulty drive which has developed bad sectors can certainly cause the system to crash out.

 

[Adept PC Repair]

This is the 2nd hard drive in the machine and it still has the same symptoms, so I guess unlikely unless related to temperature.

I have swapped the cpu from the core i3 in there to a pentium b970 I had laying around, I know cpu failures are rare, but I think I'm on to something.

 

[Adept PC Repair]

It was cpu, this is the 2nd ever cpu I've witnessed fail.

 

[Kitten Kong]

Wow. I can count on one hand the amount of bad cpu's I've dealt with in the past 12 years.

Nice catch. Well done.

 

[DataMedics]

It was cpu, this is the 2nd ever cpu I've witnessed fail.

You obviously weren't around during the Pentium 4 days when they would explode if the heatsink fan died.

 

[Adept PC Repair]

It definitely was the cpu, except for if for some reason the faster clock speed of the i3 was causing a motherboard fault. Still running now!

 

[Adept PC Repair]

You obviously weren't around during the Pentium 4 days when they would explode if the heatsink fan died.

I was, but I have never witnessed that happen. I'm guessing they were Prescott?

 

[Larry Sabo]

It was cpu, this is the 2nd ever cpu I've witnessed fail.

Good catch! Because they are so rarely the underlying fault, I don't even swap them to eliminate the possibility. (Not that I have a collection of known-good CPUs to use, anyway.)

 

[GTP]

You obviously weren't around during the Pentium 4 days when they would explode if the heatsink fan died.

I had one of those, Pentium 4 2.4Ghz if I remember right.

 

[Adept PC Repair]

Stress testing it now and she's been running for 2 hours up to now. Going to keep it on for the day to make sure.

 

[DataMedics]

I was, but I have never witnessed that happen. I'm guessing they were Prescott?

Yep. Back when they were first pushing the limit of 4GHz those suckers were hot, really hot.

 

[mikeroq]

I've come across, maybe 7 or so bad processors over the last 5 years. Most, if not all the computers either had a power supply failure that took out the board and cpu, or a dead motherboard. I think one CPU on its own might have been bad with everything else good.