Dell Optiplex GX110, very picky!

[Tommy]

This is actually not a topic of me looking for help, but possibly to help others if it's really relevant anymore. So, I was working on this machine and it was being EXTREMELY difficult. It would not finish booting no matter how often I cleared the CMOS/removed the battery, and even barebones it. It is fussy with the SL52R and I knew the processor was working but everytime I'd boot the machine it would either stop in random spots during post or complain about a goofy failure at random. So...after an hour of troubleshooting and thinking maybe the computer just went bad, I put the original 733MHz processor in it and it started up but not without a few quirks of its own now too. So after really examining the heatsink, I noticed a blot of some sort of heat compound from the factory which isn't actually centered so it didn't line up with the top of the processor but what's even more weird is at the one end of the heatsink, there is a little metal peg and when you put it on the way I think it was meant to, it touches a little metal piece on the motherboard. So when I did that and started up the computer, it started up like a charm! My theory is maybe it is some sort of sensor and if the heatsink isn't touching it, that it will do some crazy things. I do not think it was overheating because the processor wasn't that warm since it was still being covered by the heatsink. So I'm wondering if just that little strip of metal and the peg on the heatsink are what makes the machine work. Either way, doing it that way makes the machine boot perfectly. Just an interesting thing I found while trying to put it back into service today.

Edited July 28, 2015 by Tommy