A while back the heatsink retainer broke off my motherboard. I replaced it and even installed a new heatsink (intel heatsink -cheap $30). Anyway, my cpu is reaching temps of 50degrees, celcius, and goes up to 130degrees Farenheight. I don't know what is normal for a P4 1.6Ghz. I still feel this is hot though. When I installed the new heatsink, there was this black thing on the bottom of it, but it didn't seem to peel off. Do I need to buy some kind of paste? (I'm new to the computer repair stuff a little other than upgrading). Another question (but please someone answer the first) I have been playing World of Warcraft and my screen goes screwy sometimes in it with a lot of lines and the computer quits responding. Is this possibly my video card complaining about video RAM? I have an Nvidia GEForce4 5200FX Ultra with 128mb. Thank you. John Kenneth Chunn, Jr. Kennyz79@gmail.com kenny@gregandkenny.com

"When I installed the new heatsink, there was this black thing on the bottom of it, but it didn't seem to peel off. Do I need to buy some kind of paste?" The black things are the thermal pads, the usage is to fill in the gaps between the CPU and the heatsink so heat can transfer better from CPU to the heatsink. If you use a microscope and magnify it, you see that the heatsink is not 100% touching the CPU... If you remove the thermal pads and install the heatsink, your temperature will be higher than normal, but 50C is still within a reaonsable range.. For my setup at 4.1Ghz with thermaltake cl-p0024 cooler with arctic silver 5, I get 50C idle and 65C full load and you can't kill a pentium 4 by overheating it. It will start to throttle once it reach certain temperature range for a specific model, like mid 70's.. "Another question (but please someone answer the first) I have been playing World of Warcraft and my screen goes screwy sometimes in it with a lot of lines and the computer quits responding." If you see the screwy lines, try below.. 1. Update your video card drive to the lastest version from www.nvidia.com 2. Make sure the computer it not vibrating... 3. Is the video card fan working? If not then its overheated and thus you will need to replace it ASAP.. 4. Vaccum your computer regular so the dust bunnies don't fill in to the fan and heatsink, making them less effective... 5. If all above doesn't work, lock the AGP bus to 66Mhz and slow down the AGP transfer rate from 4X to 2x, then disable "AGP FastWrite" to see if that solves the problem.. If that only happens in WoW and not other games, then it could be a driver issue, but if it happens in every game, then the video card can become defective... TMP-Man Asus P5P800-SE P4 506 2.66Ghz @ 4100Mhz 1.525v Thermaltake CLP0024 w/ 2000RPM FAN 1024MB DC Corsair DDR400 40GB 5400RPM/120GB 7200RPM HD 128MB Radoen 9500 mod 9700 @ 360/585

Pentium 4 chips run either warm or hot anyhow, So you have nothing to worry about. AMD Athlon 64 X2 4400+ 2GB Dual Channel DDR 3200 Nvidia 7800GT SATA II 2x 200gig 7200rpm 16mb cache RAID-0 Gigabyte Nforce 4 SLI

50*C seems quire hot for me... P4's are always hot. specially if u have the Prescott. If you want a CPU with low temps, get the Socket 939 AMD processors with cores such as San Diego, Venice, and more. I currently have a AMD Athlon 3700+ San Diego overclocked to 2.7GHz and it runs at 32*C Idle with stock HSF. I'm also much happier with it.. it is much faster than my P4 3.2GHz. Sapphire PC-A9RD480Adv Sapphire Radeon X850CF AMD Athlon 3700+ 2.63GHz 1024MB512x2DDR400 RAM 350W Acetech PSU 16A;12v 300w SPI PSU 18A;12v