You could throw in a much faster video card something like a 6800GT or amd equal or faster, it will run games like Farcry or Half life 2 no troubles, not sure what era video will max out that system.

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Have you tried gingerly touching the HSF while it is reading 73c to verify if the reading is accurate? That seems REALLY hot. The sensor might be old and not working properly any more, that is a common problem with Abit boards at least.

That's what I was thinking. Maybe the board's thermal sensor has become defective, because 73C seems way too hot for something like an Athlon XP.

I also remember Gigabyte motherboards from that era having issues with thermal sensors.
Try and touch the heatsink that way u can tell if it's that hot

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Kind of glad to see the end of the "naked core" era ... I know some people reckon you can improve heat transfer by "de-lidding", but naked cores are fragile, vulnerable, and present a rather small surface area, all of which is critical, so quality & application of the paste is significantly more important.

Also in those days, to shim or not to shim was a thorny issue - a bad shim could cause a short, though others recommended a shim for additional resistance to hamfisted heatsink application - the ONLY thing a shim does is limit the possible rocking of the heatsink while installing

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For whatever it's worth, you made the right choice to use the onboard ATA controller.
http://www.nvidia.co.uk/page/nf2_tech.html
has a bunch of nVidia's PDF files for this chipset. The "Platform Processing Architecture" link near the bottom of that page has a blurry, but barely legible diagram which shows that the onboard ATA controller has it's own link to the southbridge chip, which in turn has a high speed link to the northbridge. So the onboard ATA completely bypasses the PCI bus. This means that as long as it's adequate, it's better to use the onboard than a PCI controller card, which would eat into the limitations of 33MHz PCI.
Note that this chipset does not have an integrated SATA feature. Any onboard SATA on nForce2 boards is running from a discrete chip which is using the PCI bus.
I really wish higher clocked PCI had been gradually adopted into desktop boards. It seems like it wouldn't have been a hard transition to make, but for whatever reason, it never happened. As a result, late PCI boards can be seriously hampered by it.

I was really happy with one of ABit's nForce2 Ultra 400 boards in my old PC. I used it with an overclocked mobile Barton chip. But much of why I was so happy with it was just because everything worked perfectly. It worked better than my current PC does.
Recently I've decided to build a decent PC for use in another room. I could use that nForce2 again, but I decided to try an 875P based Pentium 4 instead. That's partly just because it's something new for me, but also I think it will have some slight advantages against the Athlon - SSE2, hyperthreading, and more rows of memory allowed at DDR400.
Video playback is an important application, and when I tested that with the nForce2 AthlonXP I ran into some mixed results - it was better or worse depending on the OS used. I'm thinking a P4 will do better in that application. I really like the sound on the nForce2 though.

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kithylin wrote:

So apparently in my early testing last night I discovered that these 2.2 ghz Barton core chips run extremely darn hot.

As a user of a brand new system build around an Athlon Xp 3200+ which wasn't technically my pc, but eventually evolved into the owner not really caring about this system as there was a faster and newer system available, the 3200+ system was eventually handed down to me and I ended up upgrading it to its fullest extend. One of the very first things I noticed was indeed hot very hot it ran. 80C wasn't very uncommon and the system had actually locked up on more than one occasion. The stock sA HSF was adequate at best, but partially because the fins were so tightly packed, dust accumulated very rapidly and I was getting kinda tired of having to do a monthly de-dusting.

I started looking around at decent replacements and kept in mind I'd probably want a HSF that was relatively cheap and easy to mount, wouldn't clog up as quickly and had the least chance of fracturing that delicate core (those 3200+'s were like €150 continuously for years in a row!) and I ended up with the Copper Silent 3 (or was it Copper Lite 3?) made by Arctic Cooling and I was so happy with the end result I got like 10 more not very long after that.

Temps were now more in the 60C range when gaming, including with a GF 7600GS and only a single 8cm rear exhaust fan (the 12cm PSU fan did help a lot in these circumstances).

These upperbinned Bartons are really a good challenge for anyone who is relatively inexperienced with cooling hot-running bare CPUs, but having the right equipment really is half of getting the retro-computing job done 😀.

edit: It's this one https://www.arctic.ac/eu_en/copper-silent-3.html
There are some undocumented slight differences between older and newer models though, but these won't have any significant impact om the handling of these HSFs nor its performance.
These HSFs have kinda grown to be my standard s370/sA CPU cooling solution.

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kithylin wrote:

Yeah this thermaltake volcano copper one I have keeps it about 65c - 70c gaming @ 2.5 ghz, idles about 50c-55c, much better.. but still hot. I'd water cool this one if I could find a compatible block for it. Definitely needs it.

I've considered de-lidding a Core2duo chip and putting intel's metal heat spreader on top of it and see if that would help.

"on top of it"
I think you mean putting the lid of the Core2Duo on top of the Barton?

I'll admit that I don't know the technical specs or have any specific knowhow on this particular subject, but frankly, personally I think this is a terrible idea.

If you're gonna go through with it, then I'd suggest practicing with some expendable sA chip first (like some 1GHz Thunderbird or a crappy palomino, at first underclocked) and see if it will actually be meaningful to do that.

Imo it's totally not necessary to work with shims and stuff like that.
However, if you decide to try this out anyway (and please don't sacrifice the 3200+ chip, I'd kinda be a little bit heartbroken if you do sacrifice it in this way as I think it's an awesome chip in its own right), then I will be quite interested in how things turn out 😀.

A good sA HSF (the one I linked to is my #1 favorite, but there are probably other ones) along with not using any of that pink stuff or other pre-applied goo, but instead a good clean and only a tiny drop of MX3 and a good install of the HSF and decent case ventilation (8cm is minimum, a single 12cm case fan with additional cooling from the PSU) and one can run a Barton 3200+ pretty much problem free (as far as cooling the CPU is concerned).

I was just thinking of sitting the metal cover on top of the a-XP core with some little thermal paste under it, not permantly attaching it or anything radical. Maybe some day.

I doubt the heat spreader would be of any benefit in this application, at least thermally. Heat spreaders have no radiative or convective cooling capability and actually impede conductive heat transfer slightly when your heat sink uses superior material in the base.