Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with pentium

Feverish Processor

IronLizard — Fri, 21 Sep 2007 18:28:40 -0800

I have a Pentium D 925 that's running from 56 at idle and spiking to 78^oC according to Everest and even hotter according to the BIOS. How bad is this? No instability or other problems, but the fan is running through speeds like mad every time I try to do something interesting. The cooler is secure (I checked each leg and they're tight) and the paste applied sparingly. Will I hurt this by continuing to use it until I get another heatsink? What inexpensive heatsink will keep this cool?

Help me choose a barebones SFF computer.

Kwantsar — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 20:59:21 -0800

Thinking about building my own PC. Looking for smallest possible form factor barebones system with Socket 479 (Pentium M). Big pluses are: room for at least one 3.5" HD, at least one PCI slot, either onboard DVI or or an AGP slot, firewire, PS/2 mouse and keyboard jacks. I'm considering this AOpen XC Cube, but I am completely open to other suggestions or naysaying. I'll be running XP Pro. Cheaper is better, within reason. Don't care about much other than crunching numbers.

CPU heat epoxy solvent?

ChasFile — Fri, 02 Dec 2005 00:15:33 -0800

How can I de-epoxy my P4 from its heatsink? I have a 3+ year old Pentium 4 based system - socket 478 - that right now is idling at around 61 degrees centigrade. Not good, and can only manage about 10 minutes of uptime before it hard boots itself to prevent burnout. So I bought new thermal paste, but it looks like the CPU die is epoxied to the heatsink. I haven't tried too too hard, but it seems to be stuck on there pretty solid. So is there a solvent for heat epoxy? Any other solutions?

AMD or Intel?

b1tr0t — Mon, 14 Nov 2005 13:40:48 -0800

To get the best performance per dollar, do I want an Intel Pentium D or an AMD Athlon 64 X2 for my new DB+Compute server? I am contemplating building a machine for a project that involves numerical computations on large data sets. The code is written in perl, the database is MySQL, and the whole thing runs on Linux. The current code isn't parallel aware, but it would be trivial to divide the data set in half, and run two compute processes (or more), so I think a dual core CPU will get me more cycles per dollar.

Nearly all of the benchmark sites are geared towards gamers, photoshop and video users. I don't care about any of these things, so the results don't help me much.

If I get an AMD, it would be the Athlon 4400+, which is the first X2 CPU that has dual 1MB cache. I can't tell if an Intel 840 EE is comparable to the 4400+, or an 820. Obviously, if the 840 EE is on par with the 4400+, then the AMD part is the best value. I'm tempted to get an Intel 820 or 830, but would prefer not to get locked into a series of much slower processors.

My code isn't 64-bit aware, nor do I need more than 4GB RAM, so Intel's allegedly poor implementation of AMD64 shouldn't be a problem, nor should AMD's superior instruction set be an advantage.

To (Pentium) D or not to D?

nthdegx — Fri, 26 Aug 2005 05:59:03 -0800

What's the score with Pentium Ds? If I'm buying a new desktop computer, should I make sure I have this processor?

How do I slow down my Windows PC?

the fire you left me — Thu, 25 Mar 2004 13:30:40 -0800

Is there software available for Micorosft Windows that slows CPU cycles, emulating a slower machine? For example, if I wanted to test software on a Pentium II 200, emulated on a faster machine.