Ive noticed that several hardware monitoring programs are showing differences, sometimes drastic, differences from what my Bios is showing in its health monitor. for instance... SpeedFan shows my temp as being in the fifties while the bios is reading in the mid thirties for temp. and also, the voltages are reading much higher in SpeedFan compared to the Bios which says they are right on the money. There is absolutely zero instability and nothing going on that would indicate high or low voltages, but the softwre never seems to read the same as the bios. Weird... Is this something that is common to the IT8712F sensor chip? ABIT mobo Geforce fx5200 PC3200 512MB Blue glowing radioactive looking case that will give me cancer one day lol

Just an addendum to this this is also weird. I know the chip is a Barton but I notice that alot of programs see it as a thuroughbred. Strange. It clocks out to the right speed, but this reminds me of a Pentium re-labeling scheme that happened several years back in Korea and Malasia (Sorry if spelled wrong) where they were taking older slower pentiums and re- labeling them as new ones and selling them. It just seems odd that I was sold a barton and it comes up as the older Thuroughbred in software... Hmmm... ABIT mobo Geforce fx5200 PC3200 512MB Blue glowing radioactive looking case that will give me cancer one day lol

Usually Speedfan gets its numbers from the socket thermistor, which should be about 10C or more lower than the BIOS on-die temperature of the CPU that is read from the internal diode. Have updated your BIOS ? My sig is on sabbatical.

Mmmhmm the very latest :) Interesting that it is reading higher than the bios indication :) The actual pc health service on teh mobo reports that it is running at about 24 to 35 deg C I think I will trust it since it is reading from the actual chip ...or should I... heheheh ABIT VA20 Geforce fx5200 PC3200 512MB Blue glowing radioactive looking case that will give me cancer one day lol

Eitherway, those numbers are not frightening and your CPU will not buckle under that temperature. A lot of times the concerns we exhibit about CPU temps are nuances that we imagine from the digits before our very eyes, in this case you don't have to take my word for it. You go ahead pop the case's side cover and touch the heatsink after powering off the system to feel the temperature, doing that will let you know first hand, if things are too hot. My sig is on sabbatical.

Hmmm you know I used to do that with 486's hehe I forgot my whitts for a moment :) thanks for the reminder :) and yeah! you're right She's not hot to the touch :) Thanks loads :) ABIT VA20 Geforce fx5200 PC3200 512MB Blue glowing radioactive looking case that will give me cancer one day lol

You kept in mind that in the bios the system is running at idle with absolutely no work to do while in Windows it maybe running quite some stuff in the background? In that case it maybe hotter because it's working at a certain level. In the time you restart the system and go back to the bios it's already cooled again! About the Athlon XP 2600+ there are actually three different models. The Barton you mentioned and two Throroughbred with 266 and 333MHz FSB so it might be difficult to get the correct one by some software. And the Barton was the last one on the market so if the software you use is older it my not know about the Barton core so it will choose the next closer which would be the Thouroughbred! Try the latest version of CPUZ and if it's also saying it's a Thouroughbred then somehing is quite strange!