hi! i was wondering if someone could tell me what the optimum operating tempture of an Atholon 3000x should be? mines overclocked to 2.1 gigs and reaches about 105 degrees F. at full load, i would like to OC it more but the temp. thing concerns me, i don't want to cook the thing just yet thanks in advance!
yes, the heatsink and fan are stock. i've managed to OC this thing to about 2.36 gigs before it crashed so i think i can safely go about 2.25 gigs but i'm not sure about the temp. thing over an hour or two.
Yeah, if you have stock cooling you're doing pretty damn good then at only 41°C. Consider yourself lucky. Honestly I wouldn't start really worrying as the kill temperature on Athlon XPs is what... 85-90C? Can't remember. Theoretically a processor doesn't run any "better" when it's cooler. If you were to have your 3000+ at 31°C and my 3000+ was at 55°C there would be no noticeable performance difference. Heat has been shown to affect the life of your processor though, and you don't want it crashing due to overheating. I'd grab something copper and a much bigger fan if you're worried about temps. Albeit, if you hate noise I'd go with water and if you're feeling crazy go ahead and use phase shift cooling, lol jk.
