Brushing up..

When I want statistics about the hardware on my PeeCee, I use Everest (the free version). It has joombles of information about the devices on your system; motherboard, memory, hard drives and so on; invaluable. Note, there are many other tools that show more or less the same details, just with different knobs and whistles. One handy pane is the system sensors, where you can see, amongst other things, the temperatures of your CPU.

If you are overclocking a puter, this is particularly useful information. Although theoretically rated at 85°C, things do seems to start to wonk out around 67, at least in my setup. My initial attempts to overclock the Athlon failed at this barrier.

Whilst in about the gubbins I notice the CPU fan needs a clean. Actually, it needs a Damn Good Clean, so I brush and blow it back into a fairly gunk-free state. it's amazing how much muck can collect in the gills of these things.

Back in everest there must be an error, because the CPU is now at 47°C. I wait a minute or two, because the machine was switched off for a while, it'll start to toast any second. Sure enough, it starts to climb, 48, 49, 49, 49. Hmm. I calculate Pi to a few million decimal places, heat things up a bit; 49°C, still. Cool!

So, after boning up on Ram timings, FSB limits, frequency multipliers and all that jazz, it turns out the biggest hurdle was in fact, accumulated gunk; the solution, two minutes and a brush.

I must remember to schedule that.

:o) The Writing Entity @ corz.org