I had a friend with a Thunderbird athlon and he used to run it with the side of the case off and a pedestal fan pointed at it to keep the heat down.

Are you sure your slot Athlon is a thunderbird? if you've actually got a 1GHz Slot Thunderbird then that's pretty cool as I belive they are compartively rare (the socket A thunderbirds were much more common)

They won't slow down when they overheat. They'll just crash. I believe some later Athlon motherboards had a feature to automatically shut down when they overheated - like ASUS's COP feature.

DonutKing wrote:

I had a friend with a Thunderbird athlon and he used to run it with the side of the case off and a pedestal fan pointed at it to keep the heat down.

I believe you.

what a pain in the ass.

after about 1 hour its extremely hot.

after about 2 hours I can smell burning.

after about 4 hours it shuts down.

I built a nice little system with a heap of fans but with the stock cpu/heatsink fans.

the geforce was pushing a shitload of heat onto the 2 voodoo two's.

along with the cpu its a furnace and I can use it to heat up the room.

that was with the case on.

I swapped the geforce over with a tnt2 vanta I had spare and that really helped.

I pulled the case side off.

and now it wont crash but gosh its so freaking hot.

DonutKing wrote:

I had a friend with a Thunderbird athlon and he used to run it with the side of the case off and a pedestal fan pointed at it to keep the heat down.

Back in the day a friend of mine did exactly the same thing with his brand spanking new Athlon rig. 🤣

Have you taken the heatsink off and put some heatsink compound between the heatsink and CPU? Is the fan spinning correctly (or is it just one that uses only a heatsink)? Make sure the heatsink is snug, the mounting could be loose.

Fan working as intended. There is a lot of heat being transferred to the heat sink....

I'll take a good look at the thermal compound on the chip next.

Ive only turned it on once for that 4 hour stint.

It is a ~50W CPU so it is going to get hot even with the reasonably sized Slot heatsink. Could use twin fans on it.

There were some nice heatsinks made for SECC1 but it's almost impossible to find anything anymore.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/487

I have the same issue with my K7-1000. I've been looking for an Alpha p7125 for about a year now. Until then, my voodoo 2 rig will sit unused. 🙁

An alternative to the aftermarket coolers might be the big Pentium II passive coolers that OEMs used. With an 80mm fan attached they should be great. But I'm not sure if they are all removable from the PII they are attached to.

For example. Many of these on ebay for cheap. Looks like hex screws.

Add two more fans and use a different compound, P3 style slot cooler from coolermaster then go direct die as the plate that exists now holds some of the heat in place rather going into cooler.

thanks for all the info.

disappointing. I didn't expect serious heat issues. I just wanted a home for my voodoo2 SLI.

The Golden Orb is your friend

(too lazy to take my own pics so I stole from the internet)

I also have one of the black heatsinks with a dual fan setup on another of my Slot A Athlons.

rgart wrote:

thanks for all the info.
disappointing. I didn't expect serious heat issues. I just wanted a home for my voodoo2 SLI.

IMHO. At the time that processor was made, the AMD vs Intel 1000MHz Race pushed quality control of both brands.
In addition AMD Athlon power management was not working properly for long. It was only with the Asus A7V600 Mainboard with AMD Athlon 3000+ that I could actually turn on power management (StpGnt / Halt instructions), more then halving the CPU heat ouput.

A drawback of the golden orb heatsink+fan, is that one cannot buy new replacement fans for it. So I prefer other types.

There are other boards with power management support. I have a nForce2 board with S2k disconnect and a KT333 with a "cpu idle detection" option. Still, power management features don't really affect fully loaded power consumption.

There were quirks to Athlon boards and these features too. My nForce 2 board has inductor squeal with s2k disconnect enabled. I've also read of speed problems with these features.

swaaye wrote:

There were quirks to Athlon boards and these features too. My nForce 2 board has inductor squeal with s2k disconnect enabled. I've also read of speed problems with these features.

On the MSI KT4V 6712 (VIA KT400 chipset) enabling HALT results in the harddisk throughput being halved. Soundblaster live! midi synth gets distorted because of Halt or StpGnt. There may be more reasons why StpGnt and Halt were never enabled by default on such Athlon systems. IMHO the idle power usage is a real downer on that whole AMD high tide.
Nvidia probably did a better job, never tried their boards.

gerwin wrote:

You are right, but on earlier VIA boards be very suspicious: On the MSI KT4V 6712 (VIA KT400 chipset) enabling HALT results in the harddisk throughput being halved. Also Soundblaster live! synth gets distorted because of Halt or StpGnt. There may be more reasons why StpGnt and Halt were never enabled by default on such Athlon systems. IMHO it is a real downer on that whole AMD high tide.

I have too had the impression that it wasn't working correctly. I've wondered if Athlon XP notebooks perform well. They sometimes use VIA chipsets and undoubtedly have many power management features implemented.

I had an MSI 6712 with an XP 1700+ and my SAA7131 TV capture card would produce glitched frames with CPU idle halt enabled. I spent a long time thinking it was a driver/OS issue. 🙁

It's interesting that these power features were so problematic. Even the AMD 751 documentation describes these features. I wonder if it's simply that desktop motherboards weren't designed with their use in mind.

This reminds me - S2kctl is a util that can enable S2k disconnect on almost any Athlon chipset.
http://www.stargaz0r.nm.ru/main.htm
http://www.stargaz0r.nm.ru/pages/news.htm

swaaye wrote:

I've wondered if Athlon XP notebooks perform well. They sometimes use VIA chipsets and undoubtedly have many power management features implemented.

I have an Athlon XP based notebook: a Packard Bell PB07 (which I believe is a rebranded NEC Versa C200) and it's a real piece of shit. My family nicknamed it "the dragon" because of how hot it gets, with the loud fan coming on as its 'breaths of fire'.

It's very heavy but not very sturdy, the case is cracked around the hinges, it runs very slow even with lots of RAM, it literally kills batteries, as in the lithium cells go completely shorted (I guess it's a combination of heat and high power draw), runs off a humongous brick that doubles as a foot warmer, no built-in WiFi (and the mini-PCI slot is not populated nor operational), I used it with a PCMCIA WiFi card and I had to resolder the PCMCIA slot every couple of months because it'd get so damn hot the slot would desolder itself. The horrible Insyde H2O BIOS is hardcoded to downlock the CPU to ~600MHz when on battery and it can't be overridden through any means (I guess that's their 'fix' for the 5 minute battery life at full speed), did I mention it gets really really hot? One time it decided to randomly turn itself on in the middle of the night and since I put the lid down when not using it the LCD is noticeably darkened on the area that sits on top of the CPU when closed. It gets that hot.

My mom got it as part of a debt payment back in 2007 or so, XP runs dog slow on it and it won't do Vista/7 (corrupted graphics and no updated driver). I feel bad for whoever bought this at retail, it's a horrible machine. I feel like I should review/benchmark it or something just to show the world how awful it is.

133MHz wrote:

I have an Athlon XP based notebook: a Packard Bell PB07 (which I believe is a rebranded NEC Versa C200) and it's a real piece of shit. My family nicknamed it "the dragon" because of how hot it gets, with the loud fan coming on as its 'breaths of fire'.
....

What a fine tale. 😁 Yikes.

I've spent a lot of time messing with power management on my DTR Athlon 64 + K8T800M notebook. It's an eMachines M6805. It doesn't get excessively hot, thanks to a beefy cooling system with dual fans just for the CPU. But it is a ~90W CPU and if you game on it the beast does put out the heat.

Have you ever looked at CPU power state usage in XP's performance console? You can see if the CPU is entering C1 and C2. Maybe you should try S2kctl on it too!

I also live by RMClock on my Athlon 64. This program is compatible with Athlon XP-M. It lets me set up which multipliers are used by CnQ/Powernow and what voltage each uses. I can really reduce the the heat output with it. For example, the CPU's stock voltage at 2.2 GHz is 1.5v. It is stable at 1.325v. I found that 1.2 GHz is stable at a mere 1.0v. 800 MHz can be 0.8v. You can transform the power profile of the CPU quite dramatically.

But honestly this is why Pentium M was so astonishing when it came out. A cool 25-30W CPU with really solid power state support that outperformed AMD and Intel's P4.