failing like never before

Hot Hot Preshot

The summers here in southern California can be quite hot, and although it runs hotter where I originally hail from we also have air conditioning where I come from. I have a Pentium 4 Prescott, clocked at 3GHZ and the Prescott runs amazingly hot. Right now, its about 90 degrees Fahrenheit outside and my Prescott CPU is idling at 132 Fahrenheit (about 58 Celsius). Mind you, this is the idling temperature, under full load it gets much, much hotter. I compiled Xara Xtreme from source on Thursday night, and my CPU's core temperature climbed to 158 Fahrenheit (about 70 Celsius).

I have an Antec computer case with a fan-less Radeon x800 xl and a fairly nice Antec power supply with a fan that only turns on only when it starts to get hot. It was my original intention when building my desktop to have it run as quiet as possible, but that was of course a dream. Ever since I built my computer I have added three additional fans, a 80 mm fan in the front, another 80 mm fan on the side, and a little fan in the PCI slot below the graphics card, in addition to the huge 120 mm fan that can with my case and the stock CPU fan. It is still not enough.

The Pentium 4 Prescott has always been well known for putting out tons of heat, although according to Wikipedia the Prescott gives skewed temperature readings.

Upon release, many reviewers mistakenly concluded that the Prescott generated approximately 40% more heat clock-for-clock than the Northwood, and almost every review of it was negative, earning it the sobriquet PresHot. In reality, the core temperature sensor of the Prescott gives higher readings than the Northwood core temperature sensor, meaning that the increase in heat generated for CPU work done is believed to be around the 10% range.

Nonetheless, in this heat I have been forced to minimize my computer usage and run fewer applications.

I think thats about it; there really wasn't a point in this post.