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I just upgraded my processor from an AMD Athlon XP 2000+ to an AMD Athlon XP 2700+. One mistake I made was in NOT ordering Arctic Silver at the same time. Also, I decided to get a new heat sink/fan, again, after I ordered the chip and that's not here yet either. However, things are OK. CPU came, 2 days later and sure enough it's a lot hotter. Runs like a dream but idles at 51°C. What the hell was I thinking?
When I changed the chips out I also scraped that layer of gook from the bottom of my current heat sink. I never had grease before so I just kept the pad of gook on when I got my last heat sink. It didn't run very hot, idling at 45°C. My Arctic Silver hasn't arrived yet so I'm running hot right now, well not really but I'll get to why in a moment. When I cleaned the gook off of my heat sink I had nothing to replace it with - no Silver for my chip either. So right now I've my new processor in, naked, with a smooth heat sink as well. Hence my idle temperatures. Under load it can get quite hot so I looked for a temporary solution. Fire up Synaptic... The Debian software repository is terrific. If I decide I want to try or need to install a particular software application I can simply open Synaptic and either search for the package's name (huh - good luck) or by description. I searched to power down the processor and cool CPU. Each time I found athcool among the listed results. A quick search on the web for athcool led me to a couple of forums and private sites. Among many of them was a warning about the program; this may happen, blah, blah, blah. I don't mean to make whimsy of a program's warning, just don't want to type it. Anyway I installed and ran athcool. Cool, my computer didn't immediately explode. Great. *sigh* Here's a list of supported chip sets: athcool version 0.3.11
Supported Chip sets:
[Reg ID] chipsets name
[ 0x00 ] AMD-751
[ 0x00 ] AMD-761
[ 0x01 ] AMD-762
[ 0x10 ] VIA KX133
[ 0x10 ] VIA KX133
[ 0x10 ] VIA KLE133
[ 0x10 ] VIA KT133/KM133/KL133/KN133[A]
[ 0x11 ] VIA KT266/333[A]
[ 0x11 ] VIA KM266[A]/KL266/KM333
[ 0x11 ] VIA KN266
[ 0x12 ] VIA KT400[A]/KT600
[ 0x12 ] VIA KM400[A]
[ 0x13 ] VIA KT880
[ 0x20 ] SiS 730
[ 0x20 ] SiS 733
[ 0x21 ] SiS 735
[ 0x21 ] SiS 740
[ 0x21 ] SiS 741/741GX/M741
[ 0x21 ] SiS 745
[ 0x21 ] SiS 755
[ 0x22 ] SiS 746[FX]
[ 0x22 ] SiS 748
[ 0x30 ] nVIDIA nForce
[ 0x31 ] nVIDIA nForce2
Quick look up at xsensors revealed my CPU temp to be 48°C and dropping. Woohoo! But the joy was short lived. Athcool caused my machine to lock up. Nothing short of a physical reset from the button on the front of my box would release my desktop. This locking was happening frequently. I tried to force locking but that was erratic at best The only thing or event that was common to all the locks was quick mouse movement while Firefox was rendering a page, for example. As well, quick action in and between open programs produced locks. I lost at least 1 DVD because of this. What I have found is that if I pace my behavior on the keyboard and while using the mouse I can prevent lock-ups. (knocks wood) Thus far today I have been working all day with athcool on and cooling. Today I have suffered no lockups to this point. But the point is that I'd be running a lot hotter right now without athcool and I'm glad that I installed it. It will do until I get some heat-grease to apply (geek love) to my processor. Maybe athcool is for you maybe not. What do I know? It works for me and I'm sweating less for a while - idling at 51�C isn't where I want to be at. Right now, with athcool running, I'm at 40.0°C Then again who wants to run a machine subject to lockups? Athcool works fine on Etch, well, with my hardware anyway. machiner - 17 Sept 2005
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