Complete noob here so forgive me... I've got a Prescott-based P4 processor which is supposed to be thermal-regulated. From what I'm told, there's no way I can kill it as it will automatically step down when it gets to a certain temperature. My question is... is this happening on the chip or is it OS-dependent? The reason I'm asking is that I am trying to learn Linux right now but I have lost fan control in the meantime. My fans are still spinning but not speeding up when the processor gets hot. Will my chip still back off when it gets hot or is there a chance I will destroy it? I'd like to learn Linux, but not at the expense of ruining my machine. Thanks for any input... Dig

It is controlled internally by the hardware in conjunction with the BIOS. Even AMD CPUs which do not have internal thermal control are shut down by the BIOS, not the OS. Stuart

As long as the BIOS has been set to shutdown the computer at a certain temperature, sometimes in the BIOS you have to go in and enable that feature and tell it what temperature you want to use as the limit. This is a different thing to the cpu automatically slwoing down when its getting hot (I do not know if that is contolled by windows or not)

Stuart, Thanks so much for the response. So to put it simply... there is NO way I can ruin my Prescott processor by playing around with Linux? I've been worried because to get the Linux kernel to even load I've had to turn acpi=off. But if it is monitored on chip and will step down regardless of what I do with my OS... I am much more at ease. Thanks, Dig

Cliffpage, Unfortunately I have an HP BIOS which is dummied-down and does not allow me to make many changes. Running the OEM version of Windows XP that came with my machine, the fans automatically speed up anytime the cpu temp exceeds 63C. But when running Linux the thermal regulation is somehow over-ridden and the temp gets much higher. The fans never speed up. I just need to know if Linux is going to kill my processor or if it's going to back down regardless of what I do. Thanks, Dig

Hi check in the bios for automatic fan control, disable it if optional, that should run the fan at full rpm. (you should hear the fan speed up) if it doesnt run at all switch off! & re-enable the option just in case its a really finicky bios. other option is to replace the hsf fan with a variable manual speed controller. eg http://www.jdr.com/interact/print.a...

Which Linux distro are you experimenting with? As the others have said, Intel CPUs have built-in thermal protection & this protection is independent of the OS or BIOS. I know the Prescott has earned the nickname "hot potato", but 63C seems fairly warm...it depends on whether that temp is under light load or full load? If it's at light load, you may wanna check your HSF installation and/or your case cooling config. BTW, AMD CPUs have had thermal protection since the introduction of the K8 series (Athlon64).