I built a small secondary pc last night put in 1 gig ram, gigabyte motherboard, amd athlon xp barton 3000 processor, went together well, all clean parts (no dust) LOTS of airflow and case fans, placed in area with good airflow, room not hot etc, yet when i start this thing up and view the gigabyte monitor program or a program called pc wizard 2008, both show the cpu running at aprox 139-141 degrees? The system temp is in the 75-80 degree range, nothing bad, hard drive temps range 90-96 degrees (depending on load), but even under load and time on idle or not the cpu seems to hover around 139-141ish degrees.

I didn't use the gigabyte overclock settings, just standard use, program says the cpu voltage is 1.63 V
The fan speed on the cpu shows at 4680RPM

I pushed it a few hours today dumping a ton of stuff onto the hard drive (which also has fans on it) basically putting load on the system, never really went above 143 temp wise, ran solid no problems, even dumping large video and music files via usb and via dvdrom drive for over and hour still ran smooth just seemed "hot" by the temps given but that was that way right off the bat (first 5 mins) much less 3 hrs later.

The cooler isn't stock it is a kingwin kcu-7025, http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16835124002

and all the vent fins are clean free of dust or anything.

Is this temp out of range, do i need to pull the heatsync and clean the chip and plate off and redo it, I remember when i did it originally i had laid out a smooth thin layer of the stuff that came with the heatsync, or is the stuff they give you junk (do I need to go buy arctic silver or something)?

Any input appreciated, don't wanna burn the thing out but seems stable and even under hrs of load seems to stay in same range not soar higher.

Bill

You will see some charts in this link:

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu...onxp-3000.html

It lists 85c for max. 49c idle. 72c full load.

You should see more fluctuation then you are seeing but your numbers are in the low 60c.

There are many CPU testers such as Prime95. Super Pi is perhaps the easiest.

So my 61 / 141F temps aren't too off base it sounds like, maybe a tad warmer than I would like but under load I wasn't seeing it going much higher really, that gigabyte program has an annoying temp warning thing once the cpu hits 140, which seems to be right around where mine sits, so i get it popping up often telling me the cpu is too warm, i did change the setting on it to 145 and disabled the popup - ill monitor it myself.

Just sorta made me wonder if it was the thermal paste that came with the heatsync (if i needed to buy better stuff), but I did apply it in the right fashion thin even layer etc, seems like from that link the bartons do tend to run warm on average i guess...

Bill

It sounds like you took care to apply the TIM properly - so many folks slather it on - when thin is definitely better. Glad to hear that.

Depending on the type of TIM (thermal interface material) you may see a few degrees improvement with a better type of TIM, assuming that is generic white silicon paste.

You might check out my sticky TIM.