Your thermal compound is fine that way. If you apply the compound and install the heatsink then the compound will be pushed away into the tiny little imperfections of the CPU 'die' and the bottom of the heatsink.

In a perfect world you wouldn't need thermal compound if the surfaces were 100% flat but they aren't; they are almost 100% flat and for that tiny bit of imperfection you need thermal compound. Because the surface of your Athlon XP 'die' is very small and the pressure of the heatsink is high you'll press away most of the excess compound so when you remove the heatsink it looks like there wasn't much there. With bigger surfaces (let's say a Pentium MMX of Athlon 64) you won't create this effect as much.

Temperature-wise: 50C idle might be a tad on the high side but if your cooling and airflow is suboptimal or your room temperature is high then 50C can be acceptable. How are your temperatures under load? If I remember correctly your Athlon XP is rated for 85C max. temperature and if your load temperature doesn't exceed 60/65C you'll be fine. A bit cooler would give more peace of mind but it won't destroy your CPU 😉.

So:
1) check your airflow and general cooling situation.
2) feel your heatsink; if your motherboard shows 60/65C stressed but your heatsink is somewhat warm you might have a weird sensor reading. I've seen before that systems reported high temperatures but the heatsink was cold (and the contact/compound was good 😀).
3) check the vCore of your CPU. It should be 1.65V. If it's set higher it will increase energy usage and thus temperatures.

You motherboard should be able to run 200MHz (DDR400) FSB. Check if your power-supply is good and check if your memory is good, DDR400 rated, (and properly configured; enough vDIMM).

Agreed with what Thandor said.
Bartons usually run hot, so they need what - at that time - would've been very high quality cooling solutions in order to keep temperatures below what you're seeing.
I have a 2600+ Barton and I am able to keep it at ~ 40C idle, however this is with a VERY big full copper cooler, a Noctua fan, and Arctic MX-4 thermal paste.
This is one of the reasons why I really like Athlon 64 socket 939/754 CPUs: not only are they inherently much cooler than Athlon XP & late Pentium 4 CPUs (particularly the 90nm SKUs, like Venice & San Siego), but you can use a lot of cheap modern coolers that absolutely destroy anything that would've been available back in the day (like this DeepCool Ice Edge Mini FS V2.0 cooler which I used for many of my Athlon 64 builds).

That board should be fine with 400 FSB - if you haven't already, remove the north bridge heatsink and remove the petrified thermal compound and apply fresh. Regarding the BIOS, are you sure you're looking at the correct revision of the motherboard (rev. 1 rev.2)?

What heatsink/fan are you using and how's is the airflow in your case?

I was given one of those motherboards about 12 years ago, and I had to replace the capacitors. I also edited the BIOS and inserted the latest Highpoint BIOS for better SATA drive compatibility.

There are reasonably priced Adaptec Socket A coolers on Ebay that have a copper bottom, and may be better than what you now have. For the Socket A system I now have, I was lucky enough to score a Thermalright AX-7 on Ebay. It works noticeably better than the Adaptec cooler I was using. Typical temperature for my XP2400 overclocked to a 3200 is 35° idle, low fifties under load. Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today
Re: Bought these (retro) hardware today

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-05-07, 13:23:

What heatsink/fan are you using and how's is the airflow in your case?

Here's a couple pics of the heatsink/fan I am using. Have had it for quite sometime, it does have some weight to it, but doesn't have any copper.

Repo Man11 wrote on 2021-05-07, 13:04:

That board should be fine with 400 FSB - if you haven't already, remove the north bridge heatsink and remove the petrified thermal compound and apply fresh. Regarding the BIOS, are you sure you're looking at the correct revision of the motherboard (rev. 1 rev.2)?

I took and was able to remove the small heatsink and found it wasn't thermal paste, but more like double sided tape... so I removed it, applied fresh thermal paste.
Yup, made sure my board was Rev 1.0 and that is what I downloaded from the Gigabyte website.

athlon XP processors needs performance paste, not the white stuff.

Cheers,

That's not a bad heatsink honestly. Id try a better fan with more cfm first and see what your temps are.

Here's a pic of the old power supply I was using and the new one I stuck in for now as well as my DDR-400 ram. After replacing the PSU, putting thermal paste on the northbridge, I was able to run 3DMark03 right thru at 400FSB with the Sempron 3300+ and no issues. Running speed fan in the background, it appears the max temp of the CPU was about 52c, it is idling around 46-48c

pentiumspeed wrote on 2021-05-07, 20:57:

athlon XP processors needs performance paste, not the white stuff.

Cheers,

All I have is Vantec white thermal paste right now. I am going to try and get Arctic Silver 5.

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-05-07, 20:58:

That's not a bad heatsink honestly. Id try a better fan with more cfm first and see what your temps are.

I would like to try and find the Vantec Aeroflow for Socket A as that is what I had at one time. I have one, brand new, but it is for Socket 478

If you can find one that would be nice there nice coolers.

Sorry, it appears that I hadn't reset the FSB so it was only running at 333MHz instead of 400MHz. I tried running 3DMark03 at the 400FSB and it crashes after the first test and restarts the computer.

Arctic Silver 5 is really not that good of a paste compared to the stuff that is out now.

Should be fine for your application though.

On my Barton 2800+ Mobile with a KT7A, I am running a Thermaltake Big Typhoon hatpipe cooler which is way overkill for any S462 setup, but hey, why not?

Be glad you changed to a good power supply. That old one likely doesn't even have any sort of protection on it whatsoever. Plus the newer Corsair power supply is going to output way cleaner power and be a whole lot more efficient (80+ Gold baby) and run cooler than the old one.

Looking at those pics, you have a ton of caked on dirt around the socket. It could be causing issues.

Have you tried relaxing your ram timings and trying again at 400?

chrismeyer6 wrote on 2021-05-07, 21:09:

Have you tried relaxing your ram timings and trying again at 400?

I had a look in my bios and I can't change any memory timings. I can change the memory frequency (50-200% and auto). I also changed my two sticks of ram for the two in the other system and same issue.
Tried reducing the speed to 83% which is 333MHz ram, and still no luck.

Have you tried cleaning the massive amount of dirt from around the socket?

I have tried to update the bios on this board but everything I do seems to fail. I have made sure it is the correct version/revision/etc and tried using @Bios and the included flash utility and nothing seems to work..