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P4 2.6ghz heat question

Discussion in 'Hardware' started by rolandttg, Oct 25, 2015.

  1. rolandttg

    rolandttg Member

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    I fired up an old computer that I built many years ago. I installed Linux Mint 17.2 XFCE 32bit. The processor is a P4 2.6ghz with stock cooler. I can't remember what version. I vaguely remember that it ran hot. Today the bios temp was about 73c. Seems toasty to me but ran well and long enough. What is the temp range of these processors?

    ps...I do plan to reset cmos I might have some settings cranked up that might possibly heat things up.

    pss....I got a 3.2ghz on they way. he he he.
  2. Gizmo

    Gizmo Chief Site Administrator Staff Member

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    The CPU should normally run below 50C, and should only hit 70C under max load. If you are overclocking, then you should endeavor to hit lower temps than I mention, because overclocking makes the system more sensitive to heat.

    That said, the CPU is rated for about 90C, IIRC.
  3. rolandttg

    rolandttg Member

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    90c is hot! I may have to treat this as a new build. That is start all over. I have removed and replace so much on this machine over the years.......................
  4. booman

    booman Grand High Exalted Mystic Emperor of Linux Gaming Staff Member

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    yeah, at some point you have to decide if you want to keep upgrading for a little bit of speed or just build a new computer for a lot of speed
    I am stuck to low budgets, so I keep upgrading my PC's with used/refurbished parts from friends.
  5. Gizmo

    Gizmo Chief Site Administrator Staff Member

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    The Northwoods run hot, the Prescotts (PresHot), however, are like having your own miniature nuclear heat source. They can quickly approach the temperature of the surface of the sun if you don't keep an eye on them.
  6. rolandttg

    rolandttg Member

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    I found the problem. One of the locking levers was bent a little. I attemped to unlock it and the bracket broke. The heatsink wasn''t seated properly. I didn't notice it until I was looking at it from multiple angles. I pushed a little on the heatsink and the temp dropped below 60c. I think this will be an easy fix.
  7. booman

    booman Grand High Exalted Mystic Emperor of Linux Gaming Staff Member

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    Wow, how did that happen? Was it plastic?
    I don't know why a lot of CPU heatsinks are held on by plastic? Pretty bad solution
  8. rolandttg

    rolandttg Member

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    The whole bracket is plastic. I got a replacement and now it is running at around 36c. I fiddled around with some settings in bios and OS shaved about 10 seconds off boot time. It boots into full desktop in about 1 minute 40 seconds. I think the Samsung hd slows it down a lot. Samsungs HD's in my experience are usually slow. I may get a ssd for it as it should help alot. The OS on this machine is Linux Mint 17.2 XFCE 32bit. Maybe another OS?
  9. booman

    booman Grand High Exalted Mystic Emperor of Linux Gaming Staff Member

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    I have a Samsung SSD with Mint 17.2
    Its pretty fast!
    Installing games and launching them is really fast as well.
    I'm sure there are ways to optimize the booting and speed, but I have to go as vanilla as possible for my Guides.
  10. rolandttg

    rolandttg Member

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    The Samsung SSDs are great. Other post I meant to say Seagate rather than Samsung, my bad. Seagates are slow.
  11. booman

    booman Grand High Exalted Mystic Emperor of Linux Gaming Staff Member

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    well in comparison of course... I mostly have Western Digital drives in my PC's and they run fine for typical spindle 7200 RPM, but nothing compares to my Samsung SSD
    Too bad its only 120 GB
  12. Gizmo

    Gizmo Chief Site Administrator Staff Member

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    Yeah, a good SSD is easily the most cost-effective upgrade for your machine. I'm running a pair of Micron M500 960GB SSDs in my lappy and they are amazing.
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  13. Aremis

    Aremis Member

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    TL;DR that shit is hot by design like a mexican apple thief.

    I can go on to say that I am a professional P4 user and that temp basically normal. I used a P4 until this very year because that's all I have ever had.

    70c on a box NOT running windows XP is basically the most normal thing you can expect. Because of the way thread handling applications work there is a lot of owrk piped as fast as possible though a CPU that was meant to hold spare processes in cache until urgent processes were piped through first. This was a brilliant idea at the time and if you could get the CPU cooled with something like liquid nitrogen that would be brilliant. However this is why, ultimately, RISC and PPC chips were more desireable at the time. RISC was simply faster and PPC had the same heat issues with better software available and could handle workloads better.

    Ultimately this heating issue was what also killed the P4 mobile chips. They changed the design of the chip's heat spreader and the heat-passing coat of crud underneath in hopes to conquer this problem cheaply and effectively and utterly failed. The mobile chips were replaced by coppermine P3's and they were given a 1mb L2 cache and a 512k L1 and were named, you guessed it, Pentium M. These were also made into celerons at the time on the desktop side and if you happen upon a celeron for your socket pick it up and you'll have similar performance without SSE# (if it's on your chip) that stays around 45 @ idle and 55 if you start doing things, but are not giving it a load.

    This is sad to be honest. In the long run they had designed a multicore CPU and never designed another core in. THey just kinda duct taped it all and hoped that it would work. In fact all I can remember the machines being good for was applications that utilized MX and MMX effectively. What makes me laugh is some games were advertised to be best on P4 (in comparison to the [were the durons out still? I don't remember] sempron and athlon, phenom came a year after the first few adverts I believe) but they ran poorly no matter what GPU you had, amount of ram, anything. It did not matter.

    Use arch. You'll have fun.
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  14. booman

    booman Grand High Exalted Mystic Emperor of Linux Gaming Staff Member

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    I know the feeling. I don't have P4's in my desktops anymore, but I still have about 5 extra chips packed away.
    I remember AMD having a better design and less heat back then, which is why they were more preferred. Specially in laptops.
    I was given a bunch of old laptops that still have P4's and I've made them into a small (Budget) portable LAN, but those ATI video chips are horrible. Can barely play Minetest and Terraria. Those are not demanding games in any way, shape, or form. Well maybe on the Memory side, but each laptop has 2GB of RAM. They were free, so I'm not complaining, just miss the desktops when playing games on them.
  15. rolandttg

    rolandttg Member

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    This old stuff still works. If you don't mind a longer boot time. Parts are free or nearly so. XFCE behaved better when I disabled some startup services. Once up and running the old machine is pretty good.
  16. booman

    booman Grand High Exalted Mystic Emperor of Linux Gaming Staff Member

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    I was looking through my old collections and have 4 different Pentium 4 CPU's
    I even found two Socket 775 processors as well.
    I love playing with old machines, trying to get them to run games

    Every computer can run a lot of games no matter what the speed it. You just have to sacrifice some new AAA games and play some old ones.
  17. rolandttg

    rolandttg Member

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    booman, the Duo Cores should do real well!
  18. rolandttg

    rolandttg Member

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    Oh, my 3.2 P4 is here. I'll pop it at least by this weekend. This will be a 600mhz jump for $5. Next will be a cheap ssd.
  19. booman

    booman Grand High Exalted Mystic Emperor of Linux Gaming Staff Member

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    I don't think they are core2duo's
    I have a feeling they are the old celeron or pentium D's
  20. rolandttg

    rolandttg Member

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    Today, I put in a 3.2ghz P4. Temps seem good. High 50's to 60c. Desktop came up a little faster. Good boost for $5.

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