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NightHawk R8500 Shutdown - Overheating?
Noticed this afternoon that my R8500 was off. I thought that the power strip had failed so I moved the router's power adapter directly to the wall and it powered back up. After an hour or so, I came ...
Thanks for the assistance, but I contacted Netgear support this morning. They issued an RMA for an overheating unit.
I came here looking to see if others had experienced this issue. At least now I suppose this thread can serve as reference for anyone else that may encounter it.
ElaineM wrote:ShoreTech Is it possible for you to do a temperature test on the unit as to how hot it gets?
No direct way for me to test the temputare of the unit itself - unless there is a sensor within the unit accessiable via the web admin interface that I'm unaware of.
Recently again the unit displayed odd behavior sitting in a room where the temprature reached 75F and again I had to power the unit down and wait a good 25-30 minutes to let it cool down before it would actually boot, unit again felt very hot to the touch. And as before when it was hot the only light that remaind lit was the Power LED and it was glowing Orange. Seems that these units have issues with overheating. I'm going to find a "Laptop" cooler pad to put under it see if it helps with air circulation better. Perhaps a design change is needed maybe a small built-in fan wouldn't hurt.
Unfortunately NG routers don't have temp. monitoring feature for cpu and radio chips in the firmware like Asus. If over heating is suspected it is pretty easy to prove it. Cool the router with fan to force air thru the router more or remove top cover and run it. If it does not go down you knpow it may be a heat problem. Also you can take off the heat sink from the said chips to see how well thermal paste or pad is applied. I don't like pads. They seem less effective compared to good quality paste. Poor treatment of paste or pad is common problem in laptops too.
Often I remove heat sink and reapply good quality paste and make sure HS has a good tight contact to the chip. There is laptop cooling
fan trays you can buy which can be used for router or you can even raise the height of router with bottle caps or such to improve ventilation or
drill more holes on the case. Another case of router going down is bad or intermittent AC adapter. Some only checks the voltage output but
really the current should be checked under load.
