I've had this same problem, and have a couple recommendations:
1. make sure the inside of that box is clean - any dust you may have around
that cpu(which seems to be your biggest worry) clogs running whirly-parts
and helps heat things up.
2. If worse comes to worse, take the case off the box and point a little fan
towards everything-my current setup until I get my new machine(on Tuesday)
:)
3. The armoir certainly doesn't help.
Hope this helps...
Lucas
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Kurt Granroth [mailto:kurt@granroth.org]
> Sent: Thursday, March 15, 2001 6:20 PM
> To: PLUG Discuss
> Subject: Overheating system
>
>
> Does anybody here have any experience with overheated systems? I am
> at a loss what might be wrong with mine :-(
>
> Now I know what is generating the heat in the first place. I have a
> 900 Mhz Athlon (SocketA), two 7200 RPM ATA100 hard drives, a DVD drive
> and a CD-RW drive, two ethernet cards, my video card (cheap $20 one,
> though), a TV card, and a sound card. I also keep it in an armoir to
> keep it out of sight. Alas, that probably cuts down the airflow a
> bit.
>
> The problem I have is that my system locks up on a fairly regular
> basis whenever I do compiles or anything else CPU intensive. I have
> narrowed the problem down to the heat.
>
> Now it *is* hard getting an accurate temperature reading of the CPU
> since my chipset (as99127f) isn't very well supported by lm_sensors.
> But with various reboots checking the BIOS readings, I think I have a
> good idea of the temperatures ranges.
>
> Basically, my motherboard hovers between 35C and 42C. My CPU goes
> from 51C to 65C! Since everything I've read says that anything over
> 45C is a bad thing, I'm quite worried.
>
> So I bought an Enermax 300W power supply since they are so well rated
> on overclocker sites. It has an extra fan on it which supposedly
> cools down a case quite a bit. I just got a Thermaltake Aircooler
> (Socket 462). I also have a standard (no-name) intake case fan on the
> bottom front of the case. I used to have a fan that attached to the
> case and blew directly on the CPU... but I couldn't tell any
> difference in temperature and it was loud.
>
> I'm going to buy one of those "Twin Turbo" case fans that supposedly
> push 80cfm and see what happens.
>
> But I'm still a bit worried. Why does the CPU heat up so much and so
> fast? With only the BIOS setup screen running, it will go from about
> 40C to 55C in less than a minute. This seems very odd to me. Could
> it be that the CPU is "broken" and pushes out a lot more heat than it
> should? How could I tell?
>
> Anybody have an experience here?
> --
> Kurt Granroth | http://www.granroth.org
> KDE Developer/Evangelist | SuSE Labs Open Source Developer
> granroth@kde.org | granroth@suse.com
> KDE -- Conquer Your Desktop
>
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