ilyushin said:
Hmmm. So my prescott 3.0 runs at 70 thats bad eh? Wow thats lame i bought a thermaltake for like 40 bucks... got 4 fans blowing. I used some silver thermal compund that i got from best-buy guess that might be the problem. should i switch it to as5?
Artic Silver works wonders. Running a Prescott at 70C is bad. The highest I have ever seen it run was 85C. That's just asking for it. If you had an Intel Board you could dl Intel's Monitoring App and it's warning is set off at 69C. But I believe for Prescotts Intel recommends you bump the warning by 5-10C.
Does your case follow Intel's "special" design? I know that manufacturers who build PCs with Prescott must adhere to that design but people who upgrade might not, since they will probably be using their current case.
On the Intel site there is a place somewhere on their website that shows a diagram of that design and the case models which adhere to them. If I can find it I'll link it for you. But basically the case has a side vent aimed parallel to the CPU fan. Inside the vent is a tube. All of this is suppose to maximize the air flow going into the CPU fan. What you can do and is a cheap and non-dangerous solution is place a table fan a couple feet away from the vent and let it blow into it. Just by doing that I decreased my idle temp by 10C. This is without modding the heatsink, using thermal compound, stock CPU fan and heatsink, no additional case fans and etc. Just a simple fan blowing into the vent, kind of emulating having the side case completely off. Also, I make sure that my GPU, APU and other PCI devices are as far from the CPU as possible. Room temp is around 24C.
But Prescotts get hot and they use a ridiculous amount of power like 103W. No overclocker would buy it. Infact, if you're buying a P4 stick with Northwood. Prescotts were a disaster and they run slower and worse than their Northwood counterparts.
EDIT: I made a TON of mistakes. Sorry if you read this post before and went huh? I fixed the errors like sentence placement.