Pentium 4 2.53 GHz Temperatures

MGP · Post by **MGP** » Tue Dec 10, 2002 7:54 am

Hey everyone. I just wanted to know what P4 2.53 idle and stress temps should look like with a Alpha 8942 and a 80mm Panaflo L1A (sucking like Alpha specifies). My CPU is currently around 46-50C idle and hits around 54C during stress. Since I have been hearing around this forum of people with the same cooling setup and a 2.66 P4 get idle temps around the high 30's, I decided to replace the Alpha with the Intel Stock cooler to see what the temps would be then. I believe I idled aroudn the mid fifties!!! I have gone to other forums and discovered that other people seem to have the same temps that I've been getting.

This situation has been like a wild goose chase so if anyone knows what's going on, THANKS IN ADVANCE!!!! Really appreciate it.

SungHyun7 · Post by **SungHyun7** » Tue Dec 10, 2002 8:50 am

hey welcome to the forum.

i believe your temp is fine. person who got high 30's with 2.5+ghz p4 probably undervolted and possibly underclocked his/her cpu to minimize the thermal dissipation.

with normal settings, your temp should be just fine. all you can do is make sure you have good heat conducting paste such as artic silver 3 or what not between the heatsink and cpu... but i assume you've already done that.

p4 also has some mechanism to prevent it from overheating so there isn't much to worry.. as long as your benchmarks and stress programs work reliably for more than 30min or even an hour... or if you were me, 3-5days, consider your temp just fine

MGP · Post by **MGP** » Tue Dec 10, 2002 2:04 pm

But the SilentPCMember claims his 2.66 is oced to 3.0!

MGP · Post by **MGP** » Tue Dec 10, 2002 2:09 pm

In addition, if my cpu should be running cooler, then i would get cooler temps and my zalman psu probably wouldnt get as hot as it does.

By the way, does anyone know if the Intel 850E northbridge can be passively cooled? if then, what would be the best solution?

System:
Palo Alto Products ATCX (Dell Dimension 4100 case)
300 Watt ZALMAN ZM300A-APF Power Supply
Intel Pentium 4 2.53 GHz
Gigabyte GA-8IHXP (Intel 850E)
256 MB Kingston PC1066 RDRAM (x2)
120 GB 7200 RPM Western Digital HD w/ 8 MB Cache
Gainward 750XP Ultra Geforce 4 Ti 4600 128 MB DDR Golden Sample
Turtle Beach Santa Cruz DSP Sound Card
16X/48X Universal Buslink DVD Drive
40/12/40 Plextor PlexWriter CD-RW
Mitsumi 1.44 MB Floppy Drive

Cooling:
Alpha Novatech PAL8942T Pentium 4 Socket 478 Heatsink
Arctic Silver 3
80mm Silent Papst Fan on CPU
92mm Dell Rear Exhaust Fan

Post by **MikeC** » Tue Dec 10, 2002 2:32 pm

46-50C idle and hits around 54C during stress.

That sounds fine, nothing wrong with that. The Zalman PSU temp: how do you know how hot it is running? The air coming out of it is affected by both PSU generated heat as well as the CPU/HS and other component heat.

Post by **Ralf Hutter** » Tue Dec 10, 2002 6:55 pm

I'm pretty "in" to P4 OCing and 45-50C @ idle is certianly on the highest side of normal. You'd more commonly see high 20C to high 30C ranges at idle and mid 40C to mid 50C at load. These temps are with the retail HSF or maybe an 8942 or Swiftech 4000 and something like a 32 CFM Sunon or equivalent fan.

I'm running a 2.66 OCed to 3.0Ghz (150 FSB) on an Asus P4B533E. HS is an 8942 and fan is an L1A "sucking". Case is an Antec SX10x0 clone with one L1A on the back wall sucking and an Antec TruePower480 PSU. Ambient temp in here is about 70F right now. My temps are: MoBo at idle 28C, at load 32C, CPU at idle 33C, at Prime95 load 50C.

Remember, L1As are pretty low-powered fans. I'd say it's near the minimum for that range of P4. I wouldn't run anything less than that on mine. Yeah, the processor will thermally throttle itself if it gets too hot but I don't like to worry about that kind of thing. For a powerful rig like my 3Ghz P4 I'll put up with a little bit of noise.

What are your case temps? What kind of fan setup are you running in your case? Which temp monitoring app are you running? Are you sure the heatsink's mounted correctly each time? Are you using ASIII or equivalent thermal compound? Are you running at stock Vcore?

Bottom line is: your idle temp is pretty high but won't really hurt, your load temp is about normal for an 8942 and L1A combo.

MGP · Post by **MGP** » Tue Dec 10, 2002 8:40 pm

mike, about the zalman psu temps, i dont have a temp probe; however, if you are familiar with the Dell XPS or 4100 series midtowers (beige ones), I can say that when the psu gets stressed, you can feel the heat thru the case!!! i have a enermax 431 whisper psu and it runs really cool so i really have no idea if the zalman is normal. fyi, i removed the zalman's rear fan grill...

regarding my cooling setup, i do indeed have as3 between my alpha hs and the 2.53 chip. to keep things quiet, i have a relatively quiet Dell 92mm rear exhaust fan. for anyone who is familiar with the fan that dell uses to duct their cpus, its VERY similar. the other "exhaust" would be the psu. i really cant see why i would need a front intake fan as companies like Dell dont even use those and airflow inside their pcs is generally good. i just let the rear fan suck the air into the case from the front plastic bezel's openings.

Post by **MikeC** » Tue Dec 10, 2002 9:48 pm

The Zalman will definitely run hotter than the Enermax -- airflow through the latter is almost double (and the noise, too...)

MGP · Post by **MGP** » Sun Oct 26, 2003 1:05 pm

I guess I'm still "concerned" about one thing: my CPU idle/load temps. I know this is an old school thread as Ralf was running on a TruePower 480 at the time

, but does anyone have an idea why my CPU temps seem to never fall back to the "idle" threshold? For example, if I play Wolfenstein ET for an hour or two, the CPU temp hits the mid to high 50's C...and never comes back down to its typical (albeit high) idle temp of 44-46C. I'm just curious b/c it seems that many people's chips drop around 10C between idle and load periods, and this just doesn't seem to be the case with me. I've gone through two case changes, several 80mm fan swaps, experimentation with fan voltages (e.g. dual 12V exhaust fans, dual 5V exhaust fans, one 12V L1A exhaust), and three power supplies (Zalman, SparklePower, and Seasonic) to try to solve my problem, but my CPU idle/load temps always stay the same or actually become warmer. I may sound little too picky about this issue

, but would somebody be able to help me out? Any enlightenment is truly appreciated.

MGP · Post by **MGP** » Sun Oct 26, 2003 1:15 pm

By the way, a major reason for my concern is that my PC has begun to randomly reboot maybe twice per week (after being on for a long period of time)...many of these times, I leave some Word docs open after saving them, go to class, and return a few hours later to find that my PC has rebooted (my files are no where to be seen on the Windows Taskbar). If I actually witness the reboot, I notice that the reboots always happen when my case temp hits around 41C and my CPU registers 55-59C in the BIOS).

Sometimes the reboot happens during either load or idle (which doesnt really matter as my load/idle temps are essentially the same in some cases)...Now, this could be a software issue, but I'm 95% sure that it is not as I'm pretty good about maintaining my PC's software with patches, updates, etc.

josephclemente · Post by **josephclemente** » Sun Oct 26, 2003 1:37 pm

Your temperatures look perfectly fine to me... My P4 2.53 is contained within a tiny Shuttle XPC SS51G case (modded). Idle is around 41C (24C ambient measured by cheap digital clock) if sitting for at least an hour. My fans are set to speed up after full load 60C, but that doesn't happen as it heats to 59C and stays.

I once had XP reboots but it was the RAM (good RAM, it just didn't like the motherboard). Same thing was happening with a computer at work last week and replacing the RAM cured it instantly...

MGP · Post by **MGP** » Sun Oct 26, 2003 2:00 pm

Regarding the RAM, I've had the same RDRAM for two years and have never experienced the type of reboots I'm having now.

MGP · Post by **MGP** » Sun Oct 26, 2003 8:12 pm

I was just wondering -- running an L1A and a Vantec Stealth at 12V for my exhaust would probably be way to loud, so I think I'm going to experiment with just using a 12V L1A 80mm as my exhaust once again. My case, based on the popular Chieftec "Dragon" design, has two 80mm fan brackets in the rear...which one should hold the Panaflo L1A? I was thinking, duh, the top as heat rises, but then again, the lower one would probably cool my VERY hot heatsink that I placed on my 850E northbridge chip (could the very hot heatsink be a reason for my random reboots?). Any suggestions?

ghowarth · Post by **ghowarth** » Sun Oct 26, 2003 9:24 pm

I've just build a system, and it keeps rebooting randomly in XP also. I used samsung 2700 RAM and an Asus motherboard - how can you tell whether the RAM is the problem or not in a situation like this?

Post by **Ralf Hutter** » Mon Oct 27, 2003 4:48 am

ghowarth wrote:I've just build a system, and it keeps rebooting randomly in XP also. I used samsung 2700 RAM and an Asus motherboard - how can you tell whether the RAM is the problem or not in a situation like this?

Use Memtest86 t test your RAM. Run it for a few hours at least. No errors are acceptable. If you get errors (and are running multiple sticks) pull out one stick and test one at a time to narrow down which is bad.

If you get no errors from Memtest86 at least you know your RAM is good and you can proceed from there. Another common cause of random reboots is the PSU.

ghowarth · Post by **ghowarth** » Mon Oct 27, 2003 5:15 am

Thanks Ralf, that should put me on track. It could well be my psu, which is a cheapo $15 chinese one, temporarily in my system until MikeC's legendary modded seasonic arrives on these shores

MGP make sure your Alpha is firmly tightened, and that you have the correct nylon standoffs installed. I found the difference between the screws being fairly tight and very tight to be worth several degrees Celsius. Wow... I just realised you wrote that first post some time ago!

Graham

Post by **Ralf Hutter** » Mon Oct 27, 2003 5:50 am

MGP wrote:I guess I'm still "concerned" about one thing: my CPU idle/load temps. I know this is an old school thread as Ralf was running on a TruePower 480 at the time , but does anyone have an idea why my CPU temps seem to never fall back to the "idle" threshold? For example, if I play Wolfenstein ET for an hour or two, the CPU temp hits the mid to high 50's C...and never comes back down to its typical (albeit high) idle temp of 44-46C. I'm just curious b/c it seems that many people's chips drop around 10C between idle and load periods, and this just doesn't seem to be the case with me. I've gone through two case changes, several 80mm fan swaps, experimentation with fan voltages (e.g. dual 12V exhaust fans, dual 5V exhaust fans, one 12V L1A exhaust), and three power supplies (Zalman, SparklePower, and Seasonic) to try to solve my problem, but my CPU idle/load temps always stay the same or actually become warmer. I may sound little too picky about this issue , but would somebody be able to help me out? Any enlightenment is truly appreciated.

You're probably being too picky about the situation but I would be too, if I was in your shoes so I can dig where you're coming from.

You may have one of those very uncommon "weird" CPU's that just runs hot. Your load temps are fine, but your idle temps, whle perfectly safe, are definitely high considering your setup.

ALL the P4 systems I've built (probably near 80-90) idle in the 33°C ±5°C range. All of them will very quickly return to within 2-3°C of their idle temp after a load (Prime95 or whatever) is removed from them. Your CPU does not follow this pattern, yet your load temps are right in the normal range. Pretty odd.

What is your normal case temp at idle? I notice you listed 41°C but that seems to be a load temp.

MGP wrote:By the way, a major reason for my concern is that my PC has begun to randomly reboot maybe twice per week (after being on for a long period of time)...many of these times, I leave some Word docs open after saving them, go to class, and return a few hours later to find that my PC has rebooted (my files are no where to be seen on the Windows Taskbar). If I actually witness the reboot, I notice that the reboots always happen when my case temp hits around 41C and my CPU registers 55-59C in the BIOS).

Sometimes the reboot happens during either load or idle (which doesnt really matter as my load/idle temps are essentially the same in some cases)...Now, this could be a software issue, but I'm 95% sure that it is not as I'm pretty good about maintaining my PC's software with patches, updates, etc.

I highly doubt that you idle temps are in any way responsible for your reboots. The idle temp may be symptomatic of a funky CPU but that's not necessarily the case either.

There's a few things you need to do here to get a handle on this reboot issue. I'm going to assume you're running WinXP.

1) Go to "System Properties" (Win key + [Pause/Break] key), "Advanced>Startup and Recovery>Settings>System Failure" and uncheck the box that says "Automatically restart". This way if you get a BSOD your box won't just reboot (which is probably what's happening now), it'll leave you with a BSOD. If that happens, copy down the error message and Google it. It'll probably have an MSKB article or at least there'll be some Newsgroup or other posts about it.

2) Do you use the "Event Viewer? This is a very useful tool. Go to "Start>Settings>Control Panel>Administrative Tools>Event Viewer". The "Application" and "System" sections can be very helpful in diagnosing software/hardware issues. Next time you have a reboot or BSOD go into Event Viewer and look for an entry with a red or yellow mark next to it, or in the Application section look for a "DR Watson" entry. Double click on these errors and a box will open. You can read the info there and get some sort of an idea about what happened. If it's too cryptic (this is MS afterall

) you can go to EventID.net and put in the ID number and event source into the search box. This will give you an english translation of MS lingo.

Those two things will at least get you started with troubleshooting. If you can start narrowing down the potential cause of your problem you'll have a much better chance of fixing it. Just sitting staring at a freshly rebooted screen will get you nowhere. You need information, there's just too many possible causes of reboots/BSODs to just guess at it.

MGP wrote:Regarding the RAM, I've had the same RDRAM for two years and have never experienced the type of reboots I'm having now.

Doesn't matter at all. Good RAM can, and does go bad. Check your RAM (I would do this first thing before doing anything else, except turning off the reboot-on-error "feature") using Memtest86. It's linked in the post above this one.

After doing that (assuming your RAM tests OK) I'd definitely run at least 12 hrs of Prime95. This is an excellent stability tester for your system. You should get zero errors. If you do something's wrong, probably with your hardware. Prime95 will make your system run quite hot so keep your eyes on your temp sensors (and your finger on your NB heatsink

).

MGP wrote:but then again, the lower one would probably cool my VERY hot heatsink that I placed on my 850E northbridge chip (could the very hot heatsink be a reason for my random reboots?). Any suggestions?

I suppose a very hot NB HS could cause trouble. How hot is it? If it's very hot and you're not OCing, something may be wrong. The pictures I can find of that board show it actively cooled with a little gold fan. Are you using this cooling or something else? If you're using the stock heatsink without the fan, no wonder your NB is running hot! That heatsink is tiny and should not be run w/o a fan. You should consider a $5 Zalman NB123 or 147J passive NB heatsink to cool your Northbridge. Either one of those should be fine in a passive mode, or perhaps spot cooled with a Zalman bracket + 80mm 5V L1A.

MGP wrote:Sometimes the reboot happens during either load or idle (which doesnt really matter as my load/idle temps are essentially the same in some cases)...Now, this could be a software issue, but I'm 95% sure that it is not as I'm pretty good about maintaining my PC's software with patches, updates, etc.

Keeping your OS patched (especially with some of the recent MS patches) isn't itself a guarantee that everything is going good underneath that GUI. You could certainly be having software issues. If you're lucky you might catch it through Event Viewer, otherwise it's just good old nose-to-the-grindstone troubleshooting time.

MGP · Post by **MGP** » Mon Oct 27, 2003 9:41 am

I suppose a very hot NB HS could cause trouble. How hot is it? If it's very hot and you're not OCing, something may be wrong. The pictures I can find of that board show it actively cooled with a little gold fan. Are you using this cooling or something else?

I am using the Asus P4 i850 (400MHz FSB) passive northbridge heatsink (it's black and quite tiny) on my i850e -- my mobo is not compatible with either Zalman chip heatsinks...

I was thinking that maybe the two chipsets do not differ by much in terms of thermals since the i850e is basically the i850 with 533MHz FSB support?

FYI, the i850 on the Asus mobo never got very hot during operation, but I think this could be the direct result from the terrible thermal goop (resembles bubble gum) that Asus and all mobo manufacturers use for heat transfer (I use Arctic Silver 3). Anyways, I appreciate your thoughtful as well as informative post, Ralf!

Oh, btw: you have mentioned that a latent effect of your SLK-900u + 92mm Panaflo CPU cooling setup is that some of the cool air "spills" over your mobo, cooling areas such as your northbridge? Do you think that swtiching to a similar cooling setup would not only help lower my temps, but also cool the northbridge?

MGP · Post by **MGP** » Mon Oct 27, 2003 9:42 am

In addition, my case temp usually hits 41C at load, then hovers around 39-41C for hours.

Post by **Ralf Hutter** » Mon Oct 27, 2003 12:55 pm

MGP wrote:
I suppose a very hot NB HS could cause trouble. How hot is it? If it's very hot and you're not OCing, something may be wrong. The pictures I can find of that board show it actively cooled with a little gold fan. Are you using this cooling or something else?
I am using the Asus P4 i850 (400MHz FSB) passive northbridge heatsink (it's black and quite tiny) on my i850e -- my mobo is not compatible with either Zalman chip heatsinks...

Why isn't it compatible with the Zalman heatsinks? There's certainly no interference from the main HSF. If there's no clips, just glue it on using Arctic Alumina or whatever it's called. Those Zalman NB heatsinks really are quite good, they're well worth it, especially for the price. BTW - Why are you using that Asus NB HS on a G-B board?

MGP wrote:Oh, btw: you have mentioned that a latent effect of your SLK-900u + 92mm Panaflo CPU cooling setup is that some of the cool air "spills" over your mobo, cooling areas such as your northbridge? Do you think that swtiching to a similar cooling setup would not only help lower my temps, but also cool the northbridge?

That could certainly help but I think you'd be much better off putting a decent heatsink on your NB first.

MGP wrote:In addition, my case temp usually hits 41C at load, then hovers around 39-41C for hours.

Now that's pretty darn toasty! That's your basic 'idle" temp too? No wonder your CPU's idling at 44°C!! Exactly what case and fan setup are you running? You really need to get those temps down. What are your ambient temps?

MGP · Post by **MGP** » Mon Oct 27, 2003 1:45 pm

According to Zalman, the thermal adhesive + zalman heatsink only works for flat-surface chipsets like the NForce or Via's products -- not the raised die chips that are found on most Intel mobos. The problem here is that if I were to accidently brush against the heatsink, since its only attached to the raised nb die, I could possibly damage the chip (according to a Zalman rep on their messageboard).

I'm using an Asus NB heatsink b/c it used to sit on a very similar nb chip (850) and my friend's wanted one of those cool LED nb coolers with a noisy fan so I took his Asus heatsink.

As in my sig, I have a Coolermaster 710 (same as your gaming rig) with a -- might I remind -- defective Super Tornado 300 (looking for replacement). Besides the 80mm Papst fan on my CPU (the fan listed on SPCR's Recommended Fan List), I have two rear fans in the 80mm brackets both running at 5V using the Zalman multiconnector: the top is a Panaflo L1A, and the bottom is a Vantec Stealth 80mm.

My current ambient temp is quite high at 75-80degF (crappy dorm

), but I have observed almost similarly has high temps before in my home at 70degF.

For example, in my own room (ambient 70C) where my system used to reside, the CPU used to hover around 43-44C idle after boot up and the would stay at 49C after some gaming (never going back down to 43-44C). My case temps were 38C at load and 36 at idle.

MGP · Post by **MGP** » Mon Oct 27, 2003 10:14 pm

Post by **Ralf Hutter** » Tue Oct 28, 2003 5:13 am

MGP wrote:According to Zalman, the thermal adhesive + zalman heatsink only works for flat-surface chipsets like the NForce or Via's products -- not the raised die chips that are found on most Intel mobos. The problem here is that if I were to accidently brush against the heatsink, since its only attached to the raised nb die, I could possibly damage the chip (according to a Zalman rep on their messageboard).

I'm using an Asus NB heatsink b/c it used to sit on a very similar nb chip (850) and my friend's wanted one of those cool LED nb coolers with a noisy fan so I took his Asus heatsink.

The few P4 NB heatsinks that I've pulled off have a piece of ≈1/16" thick foam tape running around their circumference to help stablize them on the chipset. Kind of like the 4 little pads on an AMD CPU. I don't see why you couldn't do something similar with a Zalman heatsink. Every P4 NB chipset is the same configuration as yours and plenty of people are using aftermarket heatsinks on them and I've never heard of anyone having a problem.

MGP wrote:As in my sig, I have a Coolermaster 710 (same as your gaming rig) with a -- might I remind -- defective Super Tornado 300 (looking for replacement). Besides the 80mm Papst fan on my CPU (the fan listed on SPCR's Recommended Fan List), I have two rear fans in the 80mm brackets both running at 5V using the Zalman multiconnector: the top is a Panaflo L1A, and the bottom is a Vantec Stealth 80mm.

My current ambient temp is quite high at 75-80degF (crappy dorm ), but I have observed almost similarly has high temps before in my home at 70degF.

For example, in my own room (ambient 70C) where my system used to reside, the CPU used to hover around 43-44C idle after boot up and the would stay at 49C after some gaming (never going back down to 43-44C). My case temps were 38C at load and 36 at idle.

My case has been configured with 2 L1A's @ 7 volts as exhaust fans and one L1A @ 7 volts as the intake fan for the past year. Temps in that case are always in the low to mid 30°C range unless it get's into the low 90°F range in this room, then the case temps will run in the high 30°C range.

I'd suggest turning up your fans to run at around 7 volts and see if that helps.

One more thing I did when I first got my 710 was to tape up every hole in the front of the case except for the fan grills. I wanted to force the cooling air through the fan grills and not let it leak into the front of the case from all over. I never used the case in any other configuration, maybe this is helping my temps a little bit too.

Here's a pic of my 710 from when I first got it:

MGP · Post by **MGP** » Tue Oct 28, 2003 6:20 am

Ralf Hutter wrote: The few P4 NB heatsinks that I've pulled off have a piece of ≈1/16" thick foam tape running around their circumference to help stablize them on the chipset. Kind of like the 4 little pads on an AMD CPU. I don't see why you couldn't do something similar with a Zalman heatsink. Every P4 NB chipset is the same configuration as yours and plenty of people are using aftermarket heatsinks on them and I've never heard of anyone having a problem.

I guess the problem is that the Zalman heatsink would only be actually glued to the small, raised nb die -- I'm currently looking into getting the clips sold by Swiftech for their nb hsf and using the clips to attach a heatsink like the new Zalman heatsink. Thanks for your fan speed suggestions and nice picture of your case...I think I'm going to get some fanmates and more L1A's now.

Post by **Ralf Hutter** » Tue Oct 28, 2003 6:42 am

MGP wrote:
Ralf Hutter wrote: The few P4 NB heatsinks that I've pulled off have a piece of ≈1/16" thick foam tape running around their circumference to help stablize them on the chipset. Kind of like the 4 little pads on an AMD CPU. I don't see why you couldn't do something similar with a Zalman heatsink. Every P4 NB chipset is the same configuration as yours and plenty of people are using aftermarket heatsinks on them and I've never heard of anyone having a problem.

-- I'm currently looking into getting the clips sold by Swiftech for their nb hsf and using the clips to attach a heatsink like the new Zalman heatsink.

Dose your board have attachment points for those clips? How was the original NB cooler attached?

MGP · Post by **MGP** » Tue Oct 28, 2003 7:48 am

Wire-clip retention mechanism for the nb chipset...no push-pins.

Just not sure if the Swiftech clips will work exactly with my setup (hopefully the clips arent too long/short).

MGP · Post by **MGP** » Tue Oct 28, 2003 9:05 am

Btw, is there any legitimate reason why I should consider Thermalright's SP-94 and SLK-947U over the popular SLK-900U? I thinking that, hey, for a few bucks more, I could get a top-of-the-line heatsink to quench my CPU; however, I am worried about the sizes of these heatsinks as I would hate to get, for example, a SP-94 only to learn that the heatpipes mess with surrounding mobo capacitors.

Post by **Ralf Hutter** » Tue Oct 28, 2003 10:54 am

MGP wrote:Btw, is there any legitimate reason why I should consider Thermalright's SP-94 and SLK-947U over the popular SLK-900U? I thinking that, hey, for a few bucks more, I could get a top-of-the-line heatsink to quench my CPU; however, I am worried about the sizes of these heatsinks as I would hate to get, for example, a SP-94 only to learn that the heatpipes mess with surrounding mobo capacitors.

I'd consider the SLK947U over the SLK900U becasue it's specifically designed to have better clearance than the 900U. I'd probably pass on the SP94 for the reasons you stated.

Post by **Ralf Hutter** » Tue Oct 28, 2003 10:59 am

MGP wrote:Wire-clip retention mechanism for the nb chipset...no push-pins.

Just not sure if the Swiftech clips will work exactly with my setup (hopefully the clips arent too long/short).

Take a look at Swiftechs' MCX-159 page. There's all sorts of interesting stuff there, including a few pictures where they show an Intel NB chipset and advise you to use the little pads on each corner of the PCB to support the heatsink.

They also tell you the dimensions that are required for the retention mechanism to work:

Swiftech wrote:Compatibility: center to center distance between mounting holes ranges from 2.05" (52.1mm) to 2.41" (61.4mm).

MGP · Post by **MGP** » Wed Oct 29, 2003 12:06 am

Ok, the SLK-947U has almost sold me b/c it's only $38 from Newegg with free shipping -- now, my only question is why is it cheaper than the SLK-800's?

Should changing to the SLK-947U and a 92mm Panaflo BX @ 7V like Ralf's setup help noticably decrease my temps?