Temperature or Stability?

So I just applied the stock themal paste to my Athlon XP 3200+. It is about 8-10 degrees cooler but it's still hot (40c idle, 50-52 working). Plus my themaltake volcano 11+ heatsink is running at about 3/4 capacity to get thoes temps, and it's a little loud like that too.

So what I am wondering is, if I were to overclock it. Should I worry about temperature on the case/mother board sensor. Or just worry about the stablity of the system.
And what happens if it get up to 70c on the case temp (it reads about 10c hotter than the MB sensor)? Should I shut it down? It has gotten to 65c before on the case themometer, but that was with the fan turned pretty low.

I'm just a little nervous since my system is running a little hot, and I don't want to mess it up. What is the average temp increase for overclocking 200-300mhz more???

Its not running that hot. What i learned from this forum your system will lose stability before it starts to smoke up.

just try to keep it under 65*C and i agree with aznchaos, you'll lose stability way before you start a fire

As long as it's stable, it's not too hot.

Yes, your temps are expected to be that high at 2.2ghz, anyways. Its nothing to worry about. The Volcano 11+ is a very solid performer, and should serve you well. Overclock away as long as its stable. How much your temp will increase is dependent on your particular system, but I can give you a few pointers. I'd expect that you will reach 2.5ghz with a core voltage of 1.75 or so with that processor.

You can calculate your processor's wattage like this:
Voltage^2/Stock Voltage^2 * Clock speed/Stock Clock.

The processors frequency increases in a linear fashion, so 2500mhz would dissipate 13.6% more heat than 2200mhz. 1.75v would dissipate 12% more in itself, so you'd get more 52% heat dissipation with this projected increase. The stock dissipation is 76.8W, so this would be 117W for this overclocked setting.

Now on to what this means for you. The Volcano 11+ has a thermal resistance of .36 C/W. .36 C/w* 117W = 42°C difference between the core of your processor and ambient temperature. Currently your delta rests at 27°C, so it would run 42-27=15°C hotter. Quite significant, but again, nothing to worry about. This is purely hypothetical. The greatest increase is caused by the increase of voltage. You may get lucky and hit 2.5ghz without even changing it, for example, in which case the difference would be smaller.

I personally would improve my cooling if my temps were like that. Use some Arctic Silver and a better heat sink. But with all that aside, you should be fine so long as you keep an eye on those temps.

Ok thanks every one, I'm doing to be doing my first overclocking tonight! Wish me luck!

from personal experience if you overclock slowly and do a stability test after each increase then you'll have to flash your bios before you do any damage

Well if you CPU is a barton core, the AMD tech docs say your CPU will die at 85 C so try not to get close to that high. Try to keep your load temperatures under 50 C.

hmmm...I'm running the torture test on Prime95. and I've OCed it to 2.41 ghz@200x12 and 1.725V.

But...the case sensor is saying 70c!!!

But the MB sensor says 51c...what the hell?

Right now I'm just averagin them, so I have 60-62c. Not too bad.

Anyone have temp sensor problems on the thermaltake xaser 3 case??

What are your full system specs?

Mobo
CPU (XP 3200+)
RAM
Cooling

It's really weird since I saw another post.. saying the Xaser was reporting differently - you might want to double check the posts in Cases and PSU to make sure the sensor that comes with that case is accurate.

I really would recommend you upgrade your thermal paste and airflow... I think that your temperatures a bit too high to overclock. You should always leave head room just in case anything happens.

MB: ASUS A7N8X DELUXE
Precessor: 3200+ @2410Mhz,400x12,1.725V
RAM: 2xKingston 512Mb DDR400 (PC3200)
GPU: Nvidia Geforce4 4600 (the downside of my system besides the heat)
Sound: SB Live 5.1
Case: Thermaltake Xaser 3
Heat Sink: Thermaltake voclano 11+ (with themal paste that came with it).

I ran Prime95 torture test for 6-8 hours with no errors, so it must be stable. But still damn hot.