OK, well I can bring you an update - the electrical burnage smell from last night was in fact the rotars of my CPU fan melting - turns out that although the CPU fan is spinning it might as well not bother because it isn’t cooling anything at all.
What I’ve been seeing is the CPU flat-lining because the temperatures been hitting 80 degrees C - I can hardly beleive my CPU still works tbh. I’ve been to ‘PC Fool’ this morning to see if they have any cooling fans but they haven’t - I’ll have to beg or borrow one asap.
The temp starts off ok leveling out at around 36c - within 10 minutes of launching ET or Wolf the temperature skys upto 50c and never stops rising. By the time 40 minutes has gone by the temp is hitting 70c + and things get strange.
Funny, I just wanted to check the voltage and heat sensors again - my own saniity-check if you like - this was after a major system crash - it had been running for maybe 50 minutes when my freeze problem started-up again. Well the rpm of the fan was something like 500rpms - it should be more like 5000 for my machine :/. I found a cool (sic) utility called VCool - it specifically supports the VIA chipsets - I can monitor the temperature now and manually intervene. Bottom line - without my office fan pointing inside the case, the CPU temperature rises slowly upto 47c without Wolf or ET loaded then goes through the roof when either are launched. With the fan on, the temperature rises alot more slowly - maybe 25c over 3 hours.
I’ll be getting a replacement CPU fan tomorrow and also an additional case fan .
As for damage caused - I don’t know if this is the root cause of the problem or just a symptom of a shagged motherboard. I guess I’ll know more when I’ve fitted the fans and monitored the temperature for a few days.
Lagger - heh, well your advice was sound enough - I tell you what, how about I get you some garlic bread instead lol 