My "newbie" questions:
What type of thermal transfer medium are you using?
That tape that possibly came with the CPU fan?
Or the thermal grease that might need to be cleaned off and reapplied from time to time?
I got one computer that someone built but they installed the CPU fan upside down and it did not make full contact with the CPU. The CPU did not live long. :-(
Did you check out the fan to make sure the dirt is not blocking air flow?
6-12 month periodic cleaning is always a good idea! ;-)
"DrB" <> wrote in message news

i7gj.1955$ ...
Have two computers running Soyo Dragon+ motherboards with AMD xp 2000+ (1.67
GHz) and xp 2600+ (2.08 GHz) with cpu temperatures of 40 degC and 54 degC,
respectively, as shown on the Soyo Hardware Monitor. Recently the xp 2600
has been shutting down abruptly and I have to restart. Yesterday I couldn't
even restart without it freezing up or shutting down once into winxp-pro.
Today it started up and I deleted Norton AV in WinXP just in case that was
the problem. It is currently running so I beginning to think that the cpu
temperature gets too high. Does anyone know if 54 degC is marginal with
running added software causing it to go over the limit?
What are the temperature limits of cpu's?