j.c.f.'s Athlon Overclock Phase
II
The cool part about getting the Indoor/Outdoor
thermometer is that you can get a reading of the ambient room temperature easily, flick
the switch and wait a few seconds, very convenient. Temperatures running at 750Mhz @ 1.6V
without the TECs were typically 27 degrees F over ambient air temperatures near the case,
not too bad, and while gaming another 4 to 6 degrees warmer still. No sweat if you live in
an air conditioned apartment in Manhattan, I however happen to live in a swamp cooled
house (evaporative cooling) in Tucson and while they say "but it's a dry heat"
they're not talking about August.
I'll grant you, while it's not like the Deep South, 99
degrees F and 99% Relative Humidity we are talking about 50% RH and over which tends to
kick most swamp coolers in the butt -- meaning I get indoor temperatures pushing 90
degrees F under the worst conditions. So that's 90 + 27 + 6, ouch, 123
degrees!
Yikes, an awful lot of silicon tends to list 120 as the
upper limit on operating conditions. And that 123 degrees is not counting the fact that
since installing the thermometer I notice that the temperature right next to the computer
tends to be about 10 degrees warmer than the rest of the house, might have something to do
with the 19" monitor and the DSL router and a computer sinking enough juice for two
normal machines. Summons TECs.
But summer was still months away so I went on using my
system as it was without any active cooling, however I was noticing a disturbing situation
that would arise on my machine. Periodically the system would just get plain durn
persnickety. It had nothing to do with temperature, application or even OC'd speed as I
found when I drug the machine down to 650MHz for a while. Symptoms could include a game
crashing and upon starting the game again another identical crash to BSODs from things
like the IFS system (part of the networking). But only once in a couple of weeks and once
it happened it seemed the machine stayed that way for a number of minutes, usually by the
third reboot it's off and running happy as Larry again.
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