A little hot, but sounds ok for an XP, if your using the reference sink.

It's on the high side but not dangerous.

The Skt.A's were always a little on the warm side, my old 2600+ and 3000+ ones were always running hot in relation to the P4's at the time. Just aslong as they dont go well above 65-70 degrees I should think you're alright. It isn't helped by the fact they don't use heat-spreaders like the Intel's.

There's nothing wrong with that temp range. It's about a 70W CPU. You need a copper heatsink with lots of surface area to keep those much cooler and there isn't any benefit.

interesting, Ive heard rumors that the Athlons and XPs ran hotter and were quite power hungry (then again , Intel had the Prescott , so I guess they weren't saints in that regard either)

would one of the higher end Athlon XPs (like the 2400 or 2600) run hotter? this board supports it (I have the r2.1 version , which supports up to the 2600, as long as its the 266Mhz variety), and the Enermax 350W PSU I have should handle it just fine.

The Wikipedia lists of Athlon CPUs have power consumption documented.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Ath … microprocessors
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_AMD_Ath … microprocessors

Athlon CPUs consume much more power than any P3. The P4 line is quite similar to the Athlons, except for some outliers like the top end Prescott chips.

seems like there isn't much difference in terms of consumption between this and an Athlon XP 2400 or 2600, might be worth going with that just to get the most out of that 4600.

thanks for the help

I remember trying to cool my Athlon Thunderbird overclock, 1Ghz to 1.4Ghz. I ran a Thermalright cooler with a Delta fan on it... It was loud!

What cooler do you have on it? As said above the temps look OK, they do run hotter than the P3s. Do you have a rear case fan pulling out the hot air. Rear case fans are a must on Socket A processors.

There are options to "software cool" that may bring down idle temps...
http://mpet.freeservers.com/VCool_Mirror.html
or
http://translate.google.co.uk/translate?hl=en … 024%26bih%3D643
** caution, one site says that S2Kctl is adware, but unclear if that was an original download or a copy that may have been modified.

Additional warning.

Athlon stop grant mode is pretty brutal - the CPU spikes between operating and idle power, placing great demands on PSU and motherboard VRM stability. Also, the cache is voided during stop grant, so that there is also a spike in bus activity that may result in sound disruption.

I tried S2Kctl on my old Athlon, and while the idle cooling was impressive, it made the system unstable - may have been ok with something better than a bog standard case PSU

foey wrote:

I remember trying to cool my Athlon Thunderbird overclock, 1Ghz to 1.4Ghz. I ran a Thermalright cooler with a Delta fan on it... It was loud!

What cooler do you have on it? As said above the temps look OK, they do run hotter than the P3s. Do you have a rear case fan pulling out the hot air. Rear case fans are a must on Socket A processors.

its what you would call a standard cooler, nothing too fancy, just the average heatsink/fan you would see on most PCs at the time , quite similar to thi, though maybe a bit bigger.

http://img.tomshardware.com/us/2003/01/13/a_c … r_miprocool.jpg

as for the fan , Im running this in a Lian Li PC60 , it has 2 front fans, a fan at the top , and an exhaust fan , in addition the Enermax PSU has 2 fans as well I believe, so its actually got alot of cooling and decent airflow (although I could probably do some better cable management)

Matth79 wrote:

Athlon stop grant mode is pretty brutal - the CPU spikes between operating and idle power, placing great demands on PSU and motherboard VRM stability. Also, the cache is voided during stop grant, so that there is also a spike in bus activity that may result in sound disruption.

I tried S2Kctl on my old Athlon, and while the idle cooling was impressive, it made the system unstable - may have been ok with something better than a bog standard case PSU

Some Athlon boards have BIOS options for S2K disconnect etc. I've always seen them disabled by default. When I've tried these settings idle temp does drop a lot but annoying high frequency VRM noise occurs too. Desktop boards didn't take power management seriously back then and the boards were not adequately engineered for it. Notebooks of course relied on these features though.

I have a overclocked (10 x 166 MHz) Athlon XP "Thoroughbred A" 1700+ (now CPUID reports 2000+) with a standard cooler (+ a ten year old thermal paste 🤣 ) on MSI KT4V. The CPU Vcore is set to Auto and a sensor shows ~1.5 V.

Idle: 40-42°C (with CoolON)
Stress: 52-56°C

Those temperatures aren't bad - they're high, but it shouldn't cook the chip to death. If you upgraded to a copper sink, or one of the early heatpipe based models for Socket A, you'd probably see better temperatures during idle and load. If you live somewhere that gets very hot at times (like in the desert) it might be worth investigating (what I mean is, if you're at 59* C with ambient at say, 16* C but it's possible for ambient to be 26* C then you probably want better cooling), but otherwise it's probably okay. Especially since you probably won't run this machine 24x7.

Side questions: what kind of airflow/cooling is the case/enclosure/etc providing? Is heat being properly exhausted from both the CPU and graphics card? You might be able to help things out by changing/modifying the enclosure for better airflow.

Side input: Compared to Pentium 3, the Athlon was very hot/power hungry (and I think that's where the mythos comes from), but by the time Pentium 4 came out, the Athlon/AthlonXP were generally equal-or-better in terms of power consumption. The very high-spec Athlon chips use probably more power per FLOP (or whatever metric you like) than the "average" AthlonXP, but not dramatically so. You might consider an AthlonXP-M as they tend to be 35-55W TDP; as long as the board lets you change the multiplier and FSB values (because they come unlocked and will default to whatever the minimums are, like 100x5 or so).

obobskivich wrote:

Those temperatures aren't bad - they're high, but it shouldn't cook the chip to death. If you upgraded to a copper sink, or one of the early heatpipe based models for Socket A, you'd probably see better temperatures during idle and load. If you live somewhere that gets very hot at times (like in the desert) it might be worth investigating (what I mean is, if you're at 59* C with ambient at say, 16* C but it's possible for ambient to be 26* C then you probably want better cooling), but otherwise it's probably okay. Especially since you probably won't run this machine 24x7.

Why does this sound somewhat alarmist? 50-65C is what the majority of Athlons operated at. The max spec is 95C for that Tbird. Tbird 1.33 is also one of the hottest K7 CPUs released and keeping one of them under 50C wouldn't be trivial unless ambient temp is wintery.

I suggest that you starting hunting for a copper cooler especially if you can track down a heat pipe equipped version but if anything if your board can mount a Zalman cnps 7000 you will see better temps. T-Bird athlons run pretty hot and do many of the XP line, if you don't want to go through the trouble of finding a very good cooler you could try Mobiles instead provided that your board does have some support.

I'd only spend money on a cooler if the noise of the current one is annoying. There are no tangible benefits to just lowering temps when they are already in a typical range.

nforce4max wrote:

I suggest that you starting hunting for a copper cooler especially if you can track down a heat pipe equipped version but if anything if your board can mount a Zalman cnps 7000 you will see better temps. T-Bird athlons run pretty hot and do many of the XP line, if you don't want to go through the trouble of finding a very good cooler you could try Mobiles instead provided that your board does have some support.

Thermalright, Thermaltake, and Aerocool also made some very good heatpipe equipped sinks near the end of the Socket A era that will also work nicely.

swaaye: Alarmist? 😕

obobskivich wrote:

swaaye: Alarmist? 😕

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!

swaaye wrote:

obobskivich wrote:

swaaye: Alarmist? 😕

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!

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.