I did the following:

1. Replaced winfast motherboard with backup winfast motherboard.
The backup motherboard is same model yet strangely enough missing one ethernet port, it only has one, while the other has two, also firewire pins missing but ok.

2. Put some new artic silver 5 on the cpu.

3. Struggled to get the scythe ninja heatsink on it, pulled it off then put it back on ? I know this is bad but how bad exactly ? Could this have created an air pocket between CPU and Heatsink ?

4. Re-connected everything, everything seems to be working fine so far, windows re-scanner hardware etc.

Except the following strange things are occuring:

5. On boot-up the CPU-fan does spin up and spins for a few seconds, like 10 or 20 seconds.

6. CMOS crc checksum failure continue with default, maybe battery dead could be.

7. CPU fan stops spinning after 20 seconds no matter if in bios or booting to windows.

8. The antec 1200 has huge airflow, and the heatsink of the scythe might be transferring enough heat away from CPU, CPU according to internal sensors are 34 to 37 to 38 degrees celcius or so. I am not sure if I can trust these sensors but ok.

9. There is again a weird smelling coming from somewhere....

I am not sure what this smell is some hypothesis:

9.1 Power supply went bad after many years and is leaking gasses from capacitators ?

9.2 Capacitators on motherboard are leaking gasses ?

9.3 The CPU is burning through the PCB ? I cannot check this.
There seems to be no heat transfer among the heat pipes and the cpu heatsink, it's all cool to touch ?!? PCB smell ?

9.4 The oil I used for the fans is old and is causing a strange oily-burn smell ?

Strange thing is the hardware monitor tool says CPU fan spinning at 16.000 rpm... which is not the case.

I re-oiled all the fans in the system, except the CPU fan because it seemed fine... maybe there is some dirty in it causing to get stuck ??? I doubt it though...

It's a pain in the ass to get off... and it doesn't make much sense to me... it does spin up and then it shuts down ?

9.5 There is also some artic silver 5 leaking past the cpu but I don't think it touches anything, maybe it's artic silver 5 smell ?

The smell is the same smell as before... but less intense... when there was no fan on nforce4 chip I also noticed this smell, but much more.

I could have taken the nforce4 fan from backup motherboard and maybe re-attached it to existing motherboard could have saved me a lot of trouble.

But it was kinda good I did this cause there was so much dust everywhere...

I would like to know from you guys:

What could be causing a CPU fan to stop spinning ?|??

I already tried unplugging and replugging power cords and resets...

Also what typically causes a burning smell is it the PCB ? Or could it be old oil ? Kinda strange...

All cables are taken care off, spin around each other here and there and made sure no cables are touching any hot components, nothing seems to be getting hot... except maybe cpu and gpu ?

The gpu/graphics card is quite new... GT 1030... maybe something wrong inside of it ? Maybe thermal paste dried up... quite weird...

Hard to pin-point where the smell is coming from.

My best bet would be either somehow PCB but most likely capacitors opening up on the top slightly.... or power supply is doing something weird or is old ?

Do PCs get smelly of old age ?

My older PCs also kinda smell a bit... but this one smells a bit harder... quite weird.

Bye for now,
Skybuck.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)