A Few More Temperature Questions

[IAIHMB]

A few random questions:
-Where can I find my overall system temperature? I've looked in BIOS, but that only displays CPU.
-For CPU temperature, is 58 degrees to hot? On idle it is around 44 to 48 degrees depending on the time of day, after gaming it hits 54 to 58 degrees.
-Should I even be gaming with temperatures this hot?

Are there any cheep ways to lower these temperatures? I've already done a modification, it dropped the original idle temperature about 4 degrees. Thanks for any help guys.

[flaninacupboard]

The pentium chips will still work above 70C, so you've nothing to worry about. a large cooler with decent thermal compound may improve the situation, or you can go all out and use water cooling.

My system idles at 57C and full load is at 61C, and it's only an athlon XP2600+

[mrtristan]

Do you mean your motherboard chipset temperature? The cpu and chipset are the only two you really have to be concerned with and it doesn't look like you're running excessively hot.

You can download the freeware version of sandra and check a lot of your computer stats.

[Jayhawk]

I have a couple of Pentium 4's (2.4 & 2.8) that run at 100 - 105 (38-40c). I agree that your after-gamimg temperature of 136f or so is not critical. It might pay to invest in a better cpu fan, especially if it's not at least the retail Intel fan. Case fans can also be a cheap investment. You should have at least on in the front of the case pulling in air, and one in the back pushing it out. Small, crowded cases also limit airflow but case upgrades can be expensive.

[IAIHMB]

Thanks for the replies guys. I started with an out of the box HP, so the case is tiny. They didn't leave any room for upgrades, besides the PCI slots and an "extra" drive bay. The only thing I could do so far was cut a hole in the removable side panel and mount a 120MM exhaust fan on backwards for some type of intake. I really don't want to try and remove my heatsink, I hate messing with anything on the motherboard. :P

[Jayhawk]

The only other suggestion I would have (and you may already have done this) is to buy a can of compressed air and blow the dust out of the CPU fan and power supply fan (blow thru the power supply vents from the inside of the case).