Thoughts on system and chances of overheating

[jonleekan]

I am looking at buying an amd Athlon 64 4000+ with 2gb of ram. I will be using the machine for Tradestation. I have posted on their forum exactly this question, what is good system configuration for this software. One trader commented:

"My Athlon experience is 1 year old new, from when my two processor Athlon box overheated my PC, ruining it. burning out memory, a hard drive, motherboard and one of the two processors. I replaced the box with Intel. Intels throw out easily noticeably far less heat into the office. I do not have the Prescott P4, so know nothing about that particular one.

Heat caused PC failures are not terribly rare for high end machines. My two processor Athlon had 7 cooling fans, two of which were HeatPipe liquid cooled CPU fans on the Athlons. HeatPipes are $50 add-ons sold in particular for Athlon processors because of their heat problems. And that still turned out to not be enough cooling, even with all the noise from the fans.

PC had two high end video cards; 2 large SCSI hard drives; SCSI DAT tape drive; SCSI DVD RAM/ROM drive; 2 GB Corvair memory self correcting error checking registered RAM (Corvair is the best memory). Too much heat with the pair of Athlons."

I don't want to have a similiar experienc as this trader. Does anyone have any thoughts for a solution to this problem?

 

[Matthias99]

1) That's not a very common configuration (dual CPUs, dual high-end video, multiple high-speed SCSI drives), OR a very common problem. AMD AthlonXP chips do run fairly hot, but will not overheat and blow up if they are properly heatsinked and ventilated. That guy may have had 7 cooling fans, but if he had them set up poorly, his airflow might have still been lousy (especially if he tried to cram all that stuff into a mid-tower case). Or his PSU might have blown and fried everything, and he just thinks it was the CPUs fault.

2) The Athlon64 chips (especially the newer 90nm S939 ones) run a LOT cooler than the old AthlonXPs. P4 "Prescott" CPUs are hotter than Athlon64s of roughly the same speed in any case.