i recently upgraded my motherboard so i could take advantage of DDR ram. I think my thermal compound must have lost its ability of cooling when i swapped cpu into new board. Basically when playing games my frame rate drops stupidly low every now and then. I have monitored the temperatures and i think my cpu is hitting temps of 75+.... am i right in thinking my cpu is getting way too hot. I did read that p4's could run from 65 - 78??? with no problems. I have a p4 1.8 willamette

Around 72°C, the automatic thermal throttling on p4's kick in, which explains your sudden drops in frames. This process slows down the cpu in order to make it cool off, but slowing down the cpu affects performance. You have to reapply thermal paste with each installation of the heatsink in order for it to remain effective.

i have discovered i had a thermal pad on the heat sink, this has been removed and i am now using a heat transfer compound £4.99 job. I cleaned heatsink and chip and put a small amount of compound on chip/heatsink... however i have tested a few games... my frames are not dropping (not yet or not to an extent to which i can notice) but my pc is still running very hot (speed fan says - max temp hit whilst playing battlefield was 75???)

Thanks for the help Froggx cpu temp now not exceeding 60.5 even under servere strain from unreal 2 and hours of CS Cheers Computing net

I have a problem with either my cpu (AMD +2400) or my motherboard (ASUS A7N8X). The cpu is running hot around 60 C when using 20-40% of the CPU but when I run anything with 3D graphics to get it up to 100% usage it jumps up to 90 C and auto shuts off. I have level 3 silver thermal gel on the chip/heatsink and a good thermaltake heatsink. Any one else have this problem? I just ordered a MSI motherboard and will see if that fixes the problem. If not, i'm going to try a new cpu. Also I considered the RAM might be the problem but it's conisar 2 sticks of 256 RAM 3200 400 DDR. Any suggestions? PS i've tried underclocking underclocking the cpu and RAM.

maybe you put too much Arctic Silver 3 (thermal Compound) if there is too much... temps go up....