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ncmark wrote:

For those interested parties.... it works! […]
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For those interested parties.... it works!

Thanks to everyone who replied to my earlier inquiries about this board (the one I thought I had ruined)

After some deliberation I decided not to buy a new case to put the board in an Enlight 7250 case that had a k6-2 system (that was not being used anyway)

I am using a Nexus AXP-3200 CPU cooler. I was a bit concerned about the cpu running too hot (around 50 C) but once I hooked up the case fan and put the cover on, it dropped down to 42-43, which is good for an Athlon?

I am not sure what I am ultimately going to do with it - right now it has win98. But I may turn it into a better PCLinux box (current box is a P3-1000), or maybe even Ubuntu

Here are the specs:

Asus a7v600 board
Athlon XP 2400 with NEXUS axp-3200 cooler
Enlight 7250 case
Seagate St340016A drive (40 gigabyte)
Sound blaster 16 PCI
512 MB of RAM
Lite-on DVD drive

Temps are perfectly fine for an Athlon XP 😉
If you're worried about CPU temps, you should have the computer run for an hour of 2 with the side closed and then check the temps.
Iirc Athlon XP's could handle temps till about 80 degrees or so (which is the absolute max I think?). You're well below this 😀

Yeah, 43-43C idle was about the norm for pretty much every Thoroughbred and Barton core I've ever had, with mid-range sort of heatsinks. Some of the fancy high-end coolers could go a couple degrees better, but for a 'silent' cooler like you have, you're doing pretty good.

I recommend you try to avoid going above about 60-65C loaded though. The chips may technically be rated for 80C, but you can start running into issues in the 70s, and the temp sensors had a common tendency to read low so it's best to leave a fair bit of headroom.

Athlon boards tend to neglect various CPU idle state features. Some boards support S2K bus disconnect and even additional C sleep states. There are utilities for some chipsets to enable these features without BIOS support.

Only notebooks really made the most of power saving. Of course the mobile CPU variants also had PowerNow which didn't come to desktop until K8.

Thanks for all the feedback here 😀

I did a second, full-load (RayDream Rendering) and the temperature tops out around 50iC.

The funnny thing is - I have the same CPU in another box, with an adaptec acc-9500 cooler, which is not exactly a high-end cooler. Even with the Asus Q-Fan enabled, which is probably cutting the RPM down to the level of the nexus cooler, it is supposedly running cooler.

I think *one* of the must be reading wrong.