swaaye wrote:

Everyone always seems to get worried the CPU is gonna fry when it's above room temp. 😀 NEED HUGE HEATPIPE COPPER BLOCK WATER COOLER SYSTEM W/ PELTIER NOW!

🤣 But did I specifically say that? 😜

My point was that at 50-60* C it should be okay, and as you've pointed out that's around what a generic (for lack of a better word) aluminum heatsink could generally accomplish (meaning the TIM/mounting is probably fine). But that if it's going to be subjected to much higher ambient temperatures (if ambient temperatures were given for this build I missed it 😊), better cooling mightn't be a bad idea. Overclocking and/or constant heavy loading could also be other factors to warrant better cooling (and to make this a question for Darkman: is that 59* C where it levels out after hours of heavy usage, or just what it peaks at running 3DMark?).

nforce4max wrote:

I like to overclock and still have some margin of safety just in case something fails, once by accident I pulled the fan cable to the cooler that was on a 9800gt and didn't notice while playing wow until it hit 112c but didn't artifact 😲 . Card survived for another two years till the arson attack.

Reminds me of my Leadtek A400GT (with the *huge* copper heatsink) - the fan died at some point, and I didn't notice until I had the machine apart for regular maintenace. For all I know it could've been running like that for at least a week; I know it also continued to run like that for a few days until the replacement arrived in the mail. 🤣 Overall a lot better experience than my 9700P cooking off because the fan failed. 😒

GPUs got automatic shutdown temps sometime around 2003. Usually it's about 120C. So unless you do something like power up with with a bare die, they are hard to kill. They may become unstable before 120C though.

CPUs starting with P3 Coppermine and Athlon64 do the same. Technically the pre64 Athlon series has shutdown temps too but it is motherboard controlled and often unreliable.

My Athlon XP 3200+ (200 MHz FSB) reads out 55 C. (AXDA3200DKV4E 76.8W TDP)

However translating the read out voltage to a correct temperature for those older sensors raises always issues. So compared to the BIOS values it may as well be up to 65 C.
The Cooler is a Arctic Cooling 4TC-M which was quite popular at this time. I disabled the P-States as the Athlon XPs have the issues that they may lock-up when using a non integer multiplier like 11.5x.
So the power output of the CPU is more or less constant.

If you can find an old Swiftech MC370 heat-sink, its one of the best air coolers, for the XP.
Its all alum, but it has so much surface area, thanks to its pin\screw design not many air coolers of this era can beat it.
Anything made by Novatech is also good for the XP.

swaaye wrote:

CPUs starting with P3 Coppermine and Athlon64 do the same. Technically the pre64 Athlon series has shutdown temps too but it is motherboard controlled and often unreliable.

You can say that again. Once I almost fried Athlon Thunderbird 1.4GHz when I forgot to connect the fans power. In a few minutes the cooler became so hot it smelled quite bad... a few hours later I forgot to mount the cooler 😲 ... it was fried in a matter of seconds and it smelled even worse. This was all on Abit NF7-S v2.0 (one of the best Socket A boards) - I checked in BIOS and shutdown was enabled if the CPU temp. got over 80degC - I guess it failed 😠

Anyways... back in 2004/05 I used to run mobile Athlon at 2500MHz with temp. around 70degC.

I hate to mention this, because I pretty much want to corner the market by myself, but watch ebay for thermalright heatsinks for 462. Heatsinks like the ALX-800 can keep even the late model XP's under 50c overclocked. Provided you use the correct fan assembly. just make sure you get a complete kit.

so a little update, I decided to initially go and try to find an Athlon XP 2400, but then instead for for the same price an Abit NF7-M , along with an XP Barton 2800. I figured it would pretty much max out that GF4 4600. also that Motherboard is nforce2 based, which is probably better than the VIA board

the temps on this one are around 44-50C with the same heatsink/fan, so a decent improvement. and indeed there is a significant increase in games like Max Payne 2 where the framerate is almost twice as high.

one weird issue with this board however is that it doesn't want to boot directly into Windows via the hard drive, if I set the boot order to load from the hard drive, it kind of just stays at the "verifying DMI pool" message for a while, until it claims there is no OS there.

if I boot into Windows via the CD its just fine, and its not OS based, as I tried Win2k and WinXP, very odd and rather annoying. I mean it does detect the hard drives just fine too. very odd.