> Mandrake9.1 (no 2000 any more). It is on a Soltek SL-KT400-A4(L?) with a > 333bus. It has 512 (1 pce) of ddr333 and has a MSI mx440ses-t nvidia > geforce4 graphics card. It seems to idle somewhere mid to late 60's if > it has been running for a while (i.e. will not reduce from this). Of
Ouch, that's a tad high even for an athlon. Is it in the mid/late 60s after it has been idling for a while? That's 20 too high. You have a problem. If the CPU load cranks up, the chip will burn a lot more power and temp goes through the roof. Make sure you don't turn the overtemp cutoff off! You say the box locks dead after processing full CPU power for a while - it seems fairly obvious that it's dieing from high temp. This could be because of a subtle fault in the boards (as Paul said), or because the chips are simply not meant to run that hot. Ok that was the problem, now to the cause. I'd venture a guess that you guys perhaps didn't put the heat sink on properly. Did you ever take it off again? You have to make sure there's plenty of thermal paste under it when you stick it on again! You aren't supposed to reuse the same thermal paste pad sticker either, but dunno where to get replacements from. Other things to check are whether your cooling in the box is in fact sufficient (have a lot of disks?). If your power supply isn't strong enough you also get random system crashes, esp when disks spin up etc. Go ask the shop where you bought the hardware from. They ought to be able to give you a few tips for the money you paid them. Volker -- Volker Kuhlmann is possibly list0570 with the domain in header http://volker.dnsalias.net/ Please do not CC list postings to me.
