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Has my CPU gone haywire?

G

gearoi

Junior Member
Guys please help me:

I have a P4 3.2 Northwood running at stock speed. It used to behave just fine but recently it has started to throttle down when running a lot. I'm a gamer and obviously just can't have any throttling down at all - you get fragged in the meantime!

The problem is it runs hot - ie it reaches 62 or 63 degrees which induces throttling when I'm running the processor at 100% capacity - it takes a couple of minutes to run hot but it manages it. Then it throttles down about 20-30% near constantly. It never used to do this which means I really don't understand what has changed. I've checked the fans and they are fine still.

I've got a Zalman fan and heatsink pumping out on max, and a case fan pumping out. I had thought about putting in an intake fan, but I still get the same problem with the case open so I can't imagine an intake fan is going to put in more air than the side of the case being open.

Any ideas welcome.

It strikes me that, frankly, if it was new I'd take it back and say it was a bad CPU, but I've had it a while now and that's not going to cut it.

Thanks in advance for your help.

Graham
 
Have you dusted out your case recently, if it never used to run hot and does now it could be as simple as doing that.
 
If I turn down the voltage on the CPU to 1.5 (from 1.55v) - that seems to help the throttling - in fact it brings the temp to 61 degrees where there is no throttling instead of 62 where there is. But am I in danger of messing up my processor if I do that? Or making my system unstable?
 
That's very strange. I'd look to see if the heatsink was on it correctly, because the only real explaination I can think of for that is that the CPU isn't making full contact with the HSF.
 
I am running P4 3.2ghz on Zalman CNPS7000-ALCu. It's boiling here - 30-35*C outside. I have no air conditioning. Recently cleaned all the dust out with a Q-tip form the fan. Load temperatures dropped from 65*C to 56*C. But I never noticed the cpu throttling at any of those. Voltage is 1.60 on Abit IS7. Make sure to really thoroughly clean the dust and put the fan speed to highest.
 
Didnt someone post an article about mysterious CPU temp throttling?

Run your machine with the case off and see if its still ocuring it might be case airflow more than the cpu fan cooler.

You sure its temp throttling and not something else like Symantec anti virus choking on a network packet? Or even Microsoft firewall killing the performance? I did that to myself and it drove me nuts. Also defrag your hard drive. My swap file was on my OS partition in the early days and it caused a lot of game hicups. Now my swapfile has its own partition. Call it a linux lesson learned.
 
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