How Hot is Too Hot ?

Is that system temp or CPU temp? Either way that's rather hot for a P4. High range for an Athlon CPU temp as well. If CPU temp, high but not to damage stage. If system temp, about 20 degrees too warm and bordering on damage area.

How many exhaust fans do you have and where are they located? Any fans on front blowing over hard disks?

Make and model of case would be helpful. Or a detailed description of cooling scheme.

Dalton

I am citing CPU temperature

Sounds like the first thing you need is a more efficient CPU fan / heatsink.
If the top of the heatsink (near the fan is hot to the touch, you don't have enough fins or fan.
If the base of the heatsink (near the CPU) is not as hot as the CPU, you have poor thermal transfer.

I use power supplies with dual fans for any high performance system. This helps move the hot air from the CPU out of the case.

For case fans, while I opt for positive case pressure, I use fans with a thermal sensor. They speed up as the sensor gets hotter. That way, I don't need to remember to turn them on and they are reasonably quiet when the PC is idling.
You do want to nearly match airflow in to airflow out. More than a 10% difference in CFM in versus out can create a stagnant case.

Since you are doing video rendering, do you have a slot fan next to your video card?

Chas

Well, the cooler you keep it the longer it should last, heat will reduce the lifetime of the chips in the long run.

The pentium4 will normally "slow" itself down if it is getting too hot (about 70 degrees I think).

Have a read of this article, it's quite interesting.
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/p4-temp.html

I have just a standard case. There is a fan over the hdds,
two exhaust fans on the back, a large blow-in fitted to the side of the case over the CPU & RAM. I have flat ribbon cables (not round). No slot fan next to AGP Video, but a free space. AGP video has own fan. Pinnacle DV500 capture card.
Doing video rendering and movie encoding.

Suspect case is a bit crowded. Things improve when side of case left open!

Hi,
A comparison. I have an AMD Athlon XP2700, running at about 2.2 GHz. Turned on about an hour ago and have only browsed this site. My temps are 38 deg C for system and 50 deg C for cpu. I don't know room temperature, but it feels pleasantly cool.

most non-overclocked P4s will run stabily at up to 80 defrees celcius. if you are rendering video, you will probably be using many advanced features of pentium 4 processors, and you will probably be using a good percantage of the processor's maximum performance

This question was closed by the author