Hi, Iv just built my first PC and its running fine, just wondered if someone could answer a few questions for me, the PC is running on a athlon xp 2000+ and is running at around 48 Celcius and the IBM 7200 rpm HDD is running at around 35 Celcius (the motherboard has temperature sensors), what is the normal operating temperature for these ? do you think I need any extra cooling, I have one front case fan their is a small fan on the motherboard, a proccessor fan and one of those heat extractors in one of the PCI case slots. Thanks, James Barker-Grimshaw

The temperatures for your cpu and H/D are fine, I've just recieved an e-mail from maxtor tech support concerning my H/D temp as I thought that 50-55c was to much but they assured me these temps were not excessive, the idle temp for your cpu is between 40-50c so you are ok although if you don't mind adding more fans then do so(the cooler the better) although I wouldn't bother if it runs at 48c, you have to remember the more fans,the more noise.

Hi James: I also built my unit not too long ago. I'm running a 1900+ XP, but I was having cooling problems with my cpu in that if the ambient room temperature was anywhere over 81 deg., I could only run my computer for about 1/2 hour before I had to shut it down. I solved the problem by installing a ThermalTake Volcano 7 fan/heatsink combo. Also, be careful about adding fans randomly. You have be sure that your sucking out as much air as you are pushing in. You don't want to create a vacuum or pressure in your case. Normally, you should be pushing air in at the same rate at the bottom front, and sucking it out at the same rate at the top rear. You might also replace your ribbon cables with round cables for your drives. My cpu is running normally at 43 C. I have my HDD mounted on a heat sink with two small fans blowing across the drive. My fans have a thermistor mounted on the fan to control RPM as it heats up in the case. Hope this helps.

Depending on your motherboard, you could also use a free software cooler called VCOOL. Go to http://vcool.occludo.net/ or do a search for it on Google. It basically kills some processes in the CPU when you're not using them, for instance, when surfing the net or anything non processor intensive. It then kicks back on when you need it so there's no real performance hit. My system was running in the mid 50's and this drops it down to around 30-34C Of course, as I said if you're gaming or such, it doesn't help because the processes kick back on when needed.