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Help me! PIII Overheating!

Crap I just realized, There's a CPU heatsync/fan in the attic, I could've taken the fan off of it & used it as a chassis fan! (Now there's a car parked under the attic ladder...)
 
Things to do:

1. Get some thermal paste and restick the CPU
2. Set the BIOS settings to 533MHz
3. THEN monitor your motherboard temperature

You might find that Windows 98SE would run better on your system (especially under load), 2000 seems to struggle slightly on 256MB. Especially for games, you want all the available memory you can get!
 
atari2600a said:
I forgot the equation to convert C to F, so what's 90C in F?
Click to expand...
F = 32 + (C*1.80) or the other way around: C = (F-32)/1.80.

90C is exactly 194F, so you had the conversion made already.

the manufacturors speed is 533MHz. (4x133MHz maybe?)
Click to expand...
Yes, 4x133 sounds likely. I don't think Intel ever made any 8x66 MHz processors, at least not according to the processor specs at Geek.com.

Is there a marking on the SDRAM modules? Maybe they're only PC-66 or PC-100 and therefore the computer was clocked down from 4x133 to 4x66 (266 MHz) or 4x100 (400 MHz). Perhaps the RAM modules are of different makes, so one would function at 133 MHz bus, but the other would just make the computer crash. You'll have to test it, unless you can read the codes. Here is a site with a lot of information. Identify hardware by type, select RAM chip and follow the guide. Most, but not all brands of RAM chips are covered.

http://www.plasma-online.de/
 
dongfeng said:
Things to do:

1. Get some thermal paste and restick the CPU
2. Set the BIOS settings to 533MHz
3. THEN monitor your motherboard temperature

You might find that Windows 98SE would run better on your system (especially under load), 2000 seems to struggle slightly on 256MB. Especially for games, you want all the available memory you can get!
Click to expand...

I'm with him on Windows 98SE, I had Postal 2 Running on my 667 MHz PIII at full framerate on 416MB of RAM. I can't believe that 256K would be max for a PIII motherboard. I kicked mine up around 512MB just a few weeks ago (RAM is CHEEEP here in Seattle, I dunno why). Actually, sometime this week I'm getting a 1GHz CPU in for this thing. I also use ZSNES (that or SNES9X, I can't remember which) using the Eagle Scaler and Stereo Audio and all the bells and whistles and it works fine.

The key to keeping a Pentium III really cool is Thermal Paste. When I first put the 667 and the board together, mine was going up to 175 degrees according to Intel Active Monitor. I was using a Pentium 200 MMX heatsink (which I'm still using), so I swapped it out with a Slot 1 PIII heatsink, which brought the temp down, so I figured if I could aid the heat transfer, I'd fix it, so I added some heatsink grease and it fixed the problem perfectly. Just recently I used up my unusable slot with one of those expansion slot cooling fans, this sucker is REALLY stable now.
 
Jorg, I don't believe there was a P3 under 450MHz..
Atari, Katmai's wont overclock more than avout 20-50MHz before coming unstable.
What you could do is, get a socket 370 to slot on conversion card and pm me about a free 800MHz P3 and load it on one of those boards. They are like $10.
 
Another useful cooling tip is to polish the heatsink where it contacts the cpu. I use 400 grit sandpaper, wet. Put the sandpaper on a flat surface (glass is best) and move the heatsink in a figure 8 pattern. It doesn't have to be a mirror finish, but the smoother, the better.

This brought the idle temp of an AMD XP 3200+ from 115F to 90F. Max load temp went from 149F to 135F.

Kent
 
DimensionDude said:
Another useful cooling tip is to polish the heatsink where it contacts the cpu. I use 400 grit sandpaper, wet. Put the sandpaper on a flat surface (glass is best) and move the heatsink in a figure 8 pattern. It doesn't have to be a mirror finish, but the smoother, the better.

This brought the idle temp of an AMD XP 3200+ from 115F to 90F. Max load temp went from 149F to 135F.

Kent
Click to expand...
lol, I don't believe a katmai p3 is worth the trouble.
It is called lapping.
 
Yeah, I saw this done on The Screen Savers, back when TechTV wan't taken over by G4. That same week they also showed their modded CD-ROM & Hard Drives (They cut patterns/images into the drives cases, put transperant plastic under it, & put in blue LEDs)
 
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Yeah, I used to be into overclocking and modding, got tired of it though, too expensive.

Here is one of my units I won second place in a local computer show with.
AMD 2400XP@2.4GHz - @2Ghz stock
http://www.gallery.ubertechworld.com/albums/userpics/10002/P3060040.JPG
The images were taken before I cleaned the wiring up, but it gives you an idea.
The second cd rom is a fake for wire hiding and such.

Here is my daily machine. P4 3.06GHz@3.45GHz
http://www.gallery.ubertechworld.com/albums/userpics/10002/PIC00001~9.jpg

Here is my current server(dual P3) 2xP3 1GHz's
Side on
http://www.gallery.ubertechworld.com/albums/userpics/10002/PIC00004~7.jpg
Side off
http://www.gallery.ubertechworld.com/albums/userpics/10002/PIC00006~2.jpg

Here is my main dos machine AMD K-6 500MHz@550MHz
side view
http://www.gallery.ubertechworld.com/albums/userpics/10002/PIC00005.jpg
Front drives view.
http://www.gallery.ubertechworld.com/albums/userpics/10002/PIC00004.jpg

I have about five or six more "pimped out" machines.
I don't recommend bothering with it though, I almost got myself sunk into big debt with that hobby.
 
Atari, if you put an older harddrive as the place for the pagefile then it might slow it down some (older means slower transfer rates). If you wanna do that, figure out how to use some kind of memory card or flash ram based drive. I did something like that with a pcmcia based flash card and the system speeded up tremendously. If you can find an adapter for a pci slot that sounds best. Win didn't like it so I would have to keep resettign it but when it was set there it flew. With a memory card, there is no spin-up. And it gets warm, too so you'd need to make sure there is good airflow. About your case fans, that's all well and good, but don't forget an exhaust fan. Lots of fans that blow in arre fine but it has to have somewhere to go, like, out. What kind of graphics does it have? See if you can put in some kind of graphics board to take the load off the main processor.
 
Speaking about Pentium III, I just browsed Tradera and saw a 800 MHz kit: motherboard, CPU, some memory and optional power supply. Current bid 12 SEK ($1.70) with just a few days to go, plus the dreadful shipping. However it is from a branded computer (Fujitsu-Siemens), but I think they have less own solutions than other brands. Not that I really need one and it could be DOA. If the seller was local though..
 
carlsson said:
Speaking about Pentium III, I just browsed Tradera and saw a 800 MHz kit: motherboard, CPU, some memory and optional power supply. Current bid 12 SEK ($1.70) with just a few days to go, plus the dreadful shipping. However it is from a branded computer (Fujitsu-Siemens), but I think they have less own solutions than other brands. Not that I really need one and it could be DOA. If the seller was local though..
Click to expand...

I would not go for it. I had a Fujitsu/Siemens Socket 370 ATX board I put into a customer's computer upon request about 3 years ago, that board was NOTHING but trouble from the start. It would refuse to boot sometimes, and it had issues with it's on-board graphics adapter too (and using a GeForce on top of it).
 
I'm using an nVidia TNT2 Model 64. I know nothing about it & it's running on a driver supplied by Win2000. I searched nvidia.com for ForceWare (Release 70) for it, but it wouldn't recognize it. Is an TNT2 Model 64 good? If not, I'm thinking about going to my local surplus to pick up a dual-VGA AGP card.

Today I'm gonna try to find 2 fans for my case. I've read in an overclocking forum about this guy who put a fan on the front of his case, then made a (Tube? Tunnel? Funnel?) out of carboard that, tightly fitted, went from the chassis fan to his CPU fan. He claimed it to have dropped the tempurature to 40-something degrees ferinheit. Does this sound realistic to you guys?

PCI flash does sound like a good idea, a very expensive idea... How about this: I add another 256MB to my PC, so I have 512MB, & then turn off the PageFile. Does that sound like a good idea?
 
So do you think I should buy a dual-VGA AGP card to replace it, or should I use a PCI VGA card? (I really want a dual-monitor setup)

I shouldn't be playing any 3D-heavy games on it, mainly Point-&-Click Adventure games like Syberia Sam&Max & The Longest Journey, & some emulators (SNES/Genesis & below, &, if my card can take it, maybe N64/PSX)

I just got my hands on my MotherBoard's manual, & it says that my memory should be installed starting at DIMM4. It's been int DIMM2 for 5 years. Is this bad?
 
atari2600a said:
Today I'm gonna try to find 2 fans for my case. I've read in an overclocking forum about this guy who put a fan on the front of his case, then made a (Tube? Tunnel? Funnel?) out of carboard that, tightly fitted, went from the chassis fan to his CPU fan. He claimed it to have dropped the tempurature to 40-something degrees ferinheit. Does this sound realistic to you guys?
Click to expand...

No, not unless the machine was in a refrigerator first.

A fan and heat sink can only help make a device as cool as the air blowing across it. If the room temperature is 72F, all of the fans in creation won't get the temperature of the CPU down to 71F.
 
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