Overheating system

[Kurt Granroth]

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