The Tbird will be faster and you should be able to overclock it quite nicely.

However, you really want to use an active cooler. The coolers back in the day were complete and utter crap.

There were cases where the case exhaust fan was ducted to a large passive heatsink. You can do that but I would under no circumstance run it completely passive unless you modify a newer heatpipe cooler to mount to the heatspreader plate. Even then I would still use a fan on it.

40w can be passively cooled, but for a slot cpu it would be hard to find a cooler that can do it.
maybe if you had a psu right on top of it with a 120mm fan, but why not get a Noctua fan?

I could mount a 120mm front case fan and 80mm rear case fan, with the 120mm PSU blowing down onto the cooler. Are these CPUs advanced enough to shut down or throttle if they get to hot, before any damage occurs?

It is interesting that the 700MHz CPU will you be faster! Is that due to the faster cache?

Almoststew1990 wrote:

I could mount a 120mm front case fan and 80mm rear case fan, with the 120mm PSU blowing down onto the cooler. Are these CPUs advanced enough to shut down or throttle if they get to hot, before any damage occurs?

It is interesting that the 700MHz CPU will you be faster! Is that due to the faster cache?

There is no thermal protection on them as far as I am aware. There might be something you can set in the BIOS of the motherboard as long as it can detect the temperature and there is a setting to do so.

The faster cache is the key. You can probably change the multiplier and run it at 1Ghz if you take it apart and change a few soldered jumpered settings. There used to be things called golden-fingers that had switches on them that you could plug in and it would give you the option to change the multiplier without having to solder anything.

See here:
http://www.overclockers.com/thunderbird-slot-a/

My motherboard doesn't have options for overclocking in the bios or any jumpers sadly. Would the 700MHz still be faster than the older 800 at stock, in games?

Yes due to the full speed cache. The cpu can store and transfer data faster from it's cache thanks to that.

Somebody has to post this. 😜
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UoXRHexGIok

Also, holy shit this video is 16 years old. Kids born after it first went viral are in high school.

I remember this video, watching back in the day.
But during the years, i've forgot some details and when i was working on a Thunderbird system last year,
i have killed an Athlon 1000 cause i didn't use any thermal paste.

Since these cpu's are not so expensive the loss was acceptable.

I've actually run a late P4 without the fan (with the heatsink) for a good half an hour, during a Windows install. It reached 80c. The BIOS had previously reset to default and thermal protection was off 😒

Also how have I not seen this video before!

Thanks for the help everyone. Before I take the plunge on the 700MHz chip (I am having to ignore my brain "which is saying nooo 800 is a higher number get that one!"), will a Pluto Heatsink fit onto a Tbird cartridge? the Pluto heatsink has two clips and on the back are two little blobs which fit into two little recesses on the cartridge.

Almoststew1990 wrote:

Thanks for the help everyone. Before I take the plunge on the 700MHz chip (I am having to ignore my brain "which is saying nooo 800 is a higher number get that one!"), will a Pluto Heatsink fit onto a Tbird cartridge? the Pluto heatsink has two clips and on the back are two little blobs which fit into two little recesses on the cartridge.

If it fits on a regular slot-a athlon, it will fit on a slot-a tbird.

I bought a 4000RPM fan to replace the old fan on the CPU and it is pretty much silent which is fantastic! I am not sure how fast it is spinning, although it is a 4,000RPM fan in a normal 12v header so it must be doing 4,000 RPM right?

Almoststew1990 wrote:

I bought a 4000RPM fan to replace the old fan on the CPU and it is pretty much silent which is fantastic! I am not sure how fast it is spinning, although it is a 4,000RPM fan in a normal 12v header so it must be doing 4,000 RPM right?

Put a white dot on the fan blade and count the number of turns in one minute.

No, but you could possibly use a strobe to determine rotation frequency.

How to use a lser pointer and one led to measure rpm
https://youtu.be/RfitqGLPCUY