Billion 7800N overheating?

Had a Billion 7800N for about 16 months, had a couple of hardware replacements within the first 3 months but otherwise generally its been ok.

In December the hall where my PC setup is located was decorated and i moved the router from the floor under the desk to a shelf in one of the cupboards, there is nothing on top of, to the side, back or front of the router or underneath (apart from the shelf of course)

When the warm weather arrived i noticed the router was a little warmer on top then normal so left the cupboard door open which seemed to cool it a bit.

Today one of my folks texted me at work to say the net was down, I rang home and it emerged the router had lost ppp but was still in sync.

Talked them through rebooting and all came back up.

Zen checked and said other customer connections on my exchange have been ok.

Tonight it's done it again (sync but loss of PPP)

In the system log it shows dev_shutdown with a timestamp of shortly before I lost the connection, rebooting brought it back but have for the moment switched to a Netgear DGND3300 I keep as a nackup.

Is it overheating as the heatsink has failed?

Edited by techguy (Thu 24-Jul-14 22:00:04)

In reply to a post by techguy:

... a Netgear DGND3300 I keep as a nackup.

You mean when t'other is knackered?

That's a wonderful typo . Please do not correct it.

More seriously - how about sticking a thermometer in the cupboard and seeing how far above the specified operating temperature it is?

Edited by RobertoS (Thu 24-Jul-14 22:34:58)

Ha ha

I spend all day at work carefully typing stuff at work (detailed troubleshooting procedures normally) but it seems to go to pot when I'm not at work, particularly when tired.

My Grandmother bless her was from Lancashire, my Grandfather was a Geordie and my Mum was born in Cheshire and raised in Manchester but I was born in London but I come over a bit northern at times I'm told so only natural it should creep into my typing

I'll leave it there just for you.

Will borrow a thermometer from work tomorrow.

Edited by techguy (Thu 24-Jul-14 22:49:40)

I have my 7800N in the loft and as you can imagine, it's been pretty oppressive up there over the last few weeks with the heat. I expect high 30's centigrade plus. It's also in a vertical position and I've had no heat related issues that I know of.
So it sounds like you could be right, if a heatsink has separated from a component, I'm sure it would heat up pretty quickly.

Paul

I decided to separate the modem and router functions to reduce the overall heat build up that seems to occur on an SoC solution (even the Netgear) so as of last night my set up is now:

D-Link DSL-320B modem in Bridge mode
Router: Belkin N300

Seems to be very responsive, router appears to be cool and modem is slight warm but nowhere near as warm as the Billion or Netgear got and takes up a fraction of the space.

The lot cost me 39 quid, a a bargain compared to the Billion which had to be replaced three times.

Speed is about the same.