
Not all AMD XP's will act exactly the same when it comes to how effective a heat sink is required. If you'd named the HSF that the T-Bird was using, I missed it. I have three XP-family (K-7) AMD cpu's in PC's, and the stock HSF with the 2600 barely keeps it in some state of safety (but quietly). The T-Bird 1.33 has a small HSF from Cooler Master that is fairly noisy, and runs quite nicely with no threatened overheating.
Incidentally, neither the pads some HSF's come with, nor any type of paste, is supposed to keep the HSF stuck to the processor. The clips keep it attached to the socket, is all.
My 2800 is also running cool enough, with an AeroFlow HSF; it's not a happy cpu, however. Not from heat, although I'd sure like to find a 70 mm fan grille. It's in another NF7, and in addition to giving up various overclocking capabilities, this NF7 apparently has a bad memory controller. It's an NF7-S2"G", and the difference in a "plain" -S2 and the -S2G is advertised as Gigabyte speed LAN. The nVidia Southbridge (M-something- three initials) chip and reference MB from April of this year offered IDE RAID, but no one was admitting to have implemented that. As it turned out, that was included after all.
With a pair of Kingston Value RAM DIMMs in the slots 2 & 3, I couldn't run a Win98 install, not from CD, nor from a copy of the CD's \Win98 folder on the Hdd. I finally cloned an entire drive, swapped it to Master in the source PC, and started clearing devices out. From a past experience a month ago, I also ininstalled Norton's NSW 2003 (should've dumped NAV as well, and run the cleanup to get all the detritus. Finally, this style of putting an OS on th enew PC worked.
But totally unstable. The source drive had just been scanned for adware/malware, and for virus infections shortky before being cloned. The new PC can hardly run 15-20 minutes, even in idle, without something happening. At first, I blamed my Kingston Value RAM. The many BSOD's shared about a half dozen address locations, so I pulled the one in Slot 2 (for dual channel, I had them in slots two and three).
The system wouldn't try to post on that DIMM. Not at all. Swapped with the one that had been in slot two, the system was up, and the fatal errors were over. Not the problems. It has severe free memory leaks & drains its resource pools in minutes when any program is running. Solitaire takes 3% all by itself (not even a noticeable change in resources on the reference PC I'm using as my primary now). On bootup, it has 604 Kb of free RAM in the lowest 640, and the resources are already down to 53% free.
Running nothing but Aida32 changed that quickly. Resources dropped to 10% User and System (GDI resources still abouve 90%). Using task manager to close everything other than Explorer, System Monitor, and Systray brought the resources back to 13%. That's terrible. So I went out and bought some retail cost PNY Optima DIMMs, in case it was still a RAM problem. It's not.
:brokenheart: