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Keeping Your Vintage System Cool

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First post, by coppercitymt

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I was playing Quake on my Dell GX pro 200Mhz and I happen to touch the heat sink and it was so hot it burned my hand. I don't know if that's that normal but I don't want my system running like that. So I installed some random P III CPU fan and tapped it to one of the molex plugs 5v side to help keep things quite. And now the heat sink is not even warm to the touch.

Check your passively cooled PC's and be sure to keep them cool for a nice long life!

Ya I know it's a hillbilly repair but it works well.

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Reply 1 of 6, by FGB

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I have this DELL heatsink, too. It was never intended to be used passive. A fan is required for such a huge CPU like the PPro.

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Reply 2 of 6, by coppercitymt

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When I got the systems they never had a fan on the heat sink itself, the fan on the back of the case works but don't seem to do anything for the temp of the CPU. Unless they were removed at some point in time but I still don't see any headers to plug up a fan!

Edit:
The Service manual says microprocessor fan but it's talking about the one on the back of the case. That seems to be pretty much useless.

FGB wrote:

I have this DELL heatsink, too. It was never intended to be used passive. A fan is required for such a huge CPU like the PPro.

Reply 3 of 6, by nforce4max

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This is why I like socket 370 coolers as they are compact enough to be compatible with many socket 5/7 era machines while providing decent results.

On a far away planet reading your posts in the year 10,191.

Reply 4 of 6, by nemesis

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nforce4max wrote:

This is why I like socket 370 coolers as they are compact enough to be compatible with many socket 5/7 era machines while providing decent results.

I use a socket 370 cooler on my K6-2E+ build that I've pushed from 570MHz to over 600 several times for several hours and they stay quite cool.

Of course I did at one point have an obsession with running chips as cold as possible. For a while, I had a 4800+ AMD socket 939 CPU attached to a Prometeia phase change cooler so I could "safely" overclock it to well over 3GHz (I had a bad habit of listening to my supposedly computer savy friends back then) at about -40°. Anyway, my rule of thumb is that you should at least heatsink/fan anything over a 486 (and even some of them) and try to make sure that there is at least some airflow in the case (my only exception so far being my HTPC and even then I often run a couple tiny fans if I'm going to be running it for hours on end).

Reply 5 of 6, by badmojo

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Airflow is so crappy in older cases - particularly AT - that I've taken to putting a fan on all my chips from 486 onward. Even a 33Mhz 486 gets pretty hot, and that can't be good long term.

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Reply 6 of 6, by DonutKing

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I remember my 486SX-25 from my childhood used to occasionally crash after a long session in the middle of summer, and wouldn't POST. If you left it alone for long enough it would start working again.

If you are squeamish, don't prod the beach rubble.

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