So recently I broke one of the push pins on my core 2 duo e7400's heatsink while cleaning the cabinet of dirt. But I managed to wedge the heatsink on semi tightly anyway using the 3 working pins. Since then my processor keeps having a different clock speed on every boot, around 1.4Ghz (normal clock speed is 2.8Ghz). Sometimes it does go up to 2.8 ghz etc but that hasn't happened in several reboots now. I tried setting the fsb in the bios manually to 266 and the multiplier to 10.5, but it just ignores my settings and stays under 1.4 ghz on boot. Idle temperature for my CPU hovers around 43 degree celsius (goes to 100 degrees on load). Is there a way to fix this problem? Alternatively, is it my processor or my heatsink that has gone fubar? Which should I replace in case repair is not possible? Thank you.
Yes I'm gonna order one, though is it possible that the processor or the motherboard's processor socet are malfunctioning? Because this is a weird error as the boot speed should not be underclocked at the boot startup screen as the processor is still cold at that time..
Processor socket pins bend very easilly, check socket if they are OK. On low load, CPU saves power and underclocks itself so that is possible, yes.