Am I on the right track or headed for a crash?

[Tepin]

Hope those of you who've been here for a long time aren't sick of us who haven't asking these questions but...

A few days ago I installed my KT7 w/cpu and have it running quite fine - after beating down a few driver glitches left over from my Intel PII/350 board.

Firstly, here's what I've got...

Athalon 1GHZ running at 1.21GHz on an ABIT KT7
Multiplier set to 11, fsb @110, voltage set to 1.85

MBprobe is showing an idle temp (in Windows) of 43 C, MB temp of 24 C, CPU voltage of 1.92 - other than normal game/application usage I can't really give you a load temp but I've never seen it higher than 46 (I'm not running Quake or RC)

Everything seems ok, but I don't want to toast it this soon after the upgrade either!

If it's too hot, would a heavier fan help significantly? The one that came stock on the Taisol is 21.9 cfm. I've also got a 80mm fan running blowing in on the front, and one blowing out on the back (plus the pwr supply fan blowing out)

Just looking for reassurance I guess - is what I'm running at too hot or not? On the other hand, how much higher can I hope to get?

Any suggestions would be greatly appreciated, I'm not new to computers (work on them professionally), but am quite new to overclocking - this is my first 'solid' attempt!

 

[Fardringle]

What BIOS version are you using? The earlier versions for that motherboard were VERY inaccurate in their CPU temperature measurements. If you flash to the newest BIOS and are still getting a load temperature around 46C, then you should be fine in that respect. However, I would be pretty concerned about that 1.92v core, since AMD says that the MAXIMUM for a Thunderbird/Athlon is 1.8v. Also, once you flash to the new BIOS, if you find that the CPU temperature is in the high 50's, then you may have a problem, and should definitely consider dropping that voltage back down to 1.8v, even if it means losing a bit of that speed...

A high output fan on the heat sink would help to alleviate some of the potential temperature problems, but you are still running a risk of frying that CPU with excessive voltage.

 

[Renob]

Your fine dont worry

 

[Tepin]

Thanks Fardringle..

>What BIOS version are you using?

Looks like UL - the boards only a few days old so I expected a fairly current Bios.

> However, I would be pretty concerned about that 1.92v core, since AMD says that the MAXIMUM for a Thunderbird/Athlon is 1.8v

I wondered on that one, but the bios was set to 1.85 (that's what I'd been given previously as a suggested max), it was the MB Probe that was reporting 1.92 - I went back into the bios and shut it back to 1.8, now MB Probe reports 1.86 and it still seems stable at 1.21GHz
As an added benefit it dropped the temp back to about 39-40 idle.

Just for kicks later this week I'm going to put a 80mm fan in place of the 60 on the Taisol. That will take me from the stock fans 21cfm to around 35 with no higher noise. I've done up a template for a shroud/adapter that will do it nicely. I'll just have to wait until Friday when I'm off work to make it and put it on.