Interesting. I got the information from one of our hardware folks and he said 175F was the beginning stages of silicon degradation. Perhaps melting was a bit extreme. My chip does have signs of degradation though and it has only ever reached 90C or so. I have small halos in the brown material surrounding the entire CPU and it's various chips on my AMD 3200 XP+. My XP 3200+ has about 6 chips arranged 3x3 around the central chip that is raised up a bit. When you look parallel to a light source you can definitely see some surface alterations in areas where heat has built up.Sorry, but silicon doesn't melt for several hundred degrees above 175'F. Having worked at the site that handles "faulty processor returns" at AMD in Europe, I have seen a few examples of what happens when the processor gets FAR too hot - the common problem with these processors is shorts between pins - this is caused by the solder that is used to connect the actual chip to the substrate melts - this happens at around 200'C - roughly 400'F.
Athlon 64 processors all have an internal shutdown temperature sensor that shuts the processor off before it takes any damage. This will probably happen around 100-120'C.
Good information though. Now I will have to take to task the fella that misinformed me. I apologize for the misinformation.
30C?! Wow. I could never get that low unless I put water cooling in or liquid nitrogen. My fan setups and CPU fan keep the CPU around 50C to 55C and 60C to 65C under load. Of course I'm sure Athlon 64's run cooler than the 32-bit. I'll find out soon enough when I upgrade.Anything above 30C is tough to handle for folks who are not used to high temps (like me)
Wouldn't by chance be a GigaByte board would it? My father had a similar problem with his previous GigaByte board. The folks at GigaByte said there was some type of video temp sensor that was tripping and resetting the system. After trying everything they said and more to fix it we never were able to resolve it and went back to an ASUS mobo. It only happened when playing games. Of course NVidia techs blamed it on the mobo as well.My CPU can take heat upto 70C.
A slight increase and...
*KABOOM* it restarts.