What's the black mark on the heatsink?
Judging by the deeper copper colour near the thermal paste (on the heatsink), it looks like it was running very hot.
the black mark is the only remains of the heatsink's original black color. the heatsink is aluminum and it had discolored. the copper heatsink where the chipset looks very worn out and is discolored too.
I would say it's the remains of some component that overheated and burned out, but without more information, it's hard to say for sure.
c
i haven't seen any burnt out components.
I don't entirely understand what I'm looking at here: is that damage to the top of the chip?
i'm not sure what it is either, but looking at ONE other photo i found of this chip on house of moth, it appears to look very worn out. there are small "bubbles" on the die of my chip. what i can say is that the epoxy is NOT looking good.
I guess those are chipset controllers with small heatsinks needing proper airflow to stay cool. On PC motherboards they would have a large heatsink and a cooling fan or heat pipe.
the northbridge uses that large heatsink and the southbridge uses the small aluminum one. my question is how did the southbridge run so hot to the point it managed to discolor the heatsink??
could have. all i can say is that the board is toast and the CPU might be too. i just want to reach out to ensure that i'm not alone and find out if someone else had this same issue too. some people did report CHECKSTOP lights but they said their CPU had simply overheated and i've only seen posts about the light coming on in the G5 quad, which i do NOT have.