Underclocking (gasp!)

My computer (with the heatware mostly being a 2100+ palamino) is residing in my bedroom, and as summer approaches, it's really too warm to run the mofo 24/7. I like to keep it up since I'm using it to serve various abandonware over IRC. Basically, what would it take to halve the heat output? Could I undervolt it as well as underclock? Also, is there an easy software way to switch between the soon-to-be overclocked state and the underclocked settings without rebooting and playing with the BIOS?

Get a better heatsink and make sure you have good case airflow. What sort of temps are you getting? Even with the stock AMD heatsink which stinks, at stock speeds and just the psu fan for exaust you should be perfectly fine 24/7.

Try to undervolt it.

Depending on whether your motherboard/clock generator chip is supported, cpufsb or one of it's equivalents should let you set speeds from within windows. I don't think you'll find a program that will let you change core voltage from windows, but I could be wrong. In any case, lowering just the speed will reduce heat output somewhat. You may very well find that your chip will operate at default speed or a little lower at considerably lower-than-stock voltage. That will give a large heat reduction, more than just slowing it down at a give voltage. Another option might be to pick up a morgan core duron-they run pretty cool compared to the later chips in my experience.

JDXNC: Better cooling wouldn't help here. No matter how good or bad the cooling setup is, ~60 watts or whatever power the chip consumes will be dumped into the room around it. And I am working on a watercooling setup, with full intents to overclock it when I'm done. I just don't want to have an 80 to 100 watt heater in my not-so-well ventilated room.

Also, I don't want to get a chip with a cooler core. What I plan on doing is getting an AIUHB tbred or some other nicely overclocking chip. I mostly want to underclock it so I don't melt at night.

I'll look into cpufsb and other things like that tomorrow. It should be pretty easy to *lower* everything.

Have you checked your BIOS to see if you can reduce the voltage? I tried it once on a K6-2, and was able to run it passively cooled with a large heatsink, I believe it was running at 1.9v vs the stock 2.2, and it was running at 400(i think.. was a while ago) down from the stock 450.

BTW... your CPU puts out about 72 watts of heat.

What temps are you getting?

Right now with stock speeds and cooling, I'm getting around 60C load and 50C idle. It gets higher if I don't dust every month or so... Definately on the warm side, but it's stable. I'll play with underclocking and undervolting tomorrow... right now I need to play some Vice City

Hmm... not a whole lot of success so far. In the BIOS I lowered the FSB to 100mhz, and the vcore to 1.725 volts, both being the lowest settings available. That dropped the idle temp about 4C from where it was right before I underclocked it... not a huge difference in heat output.

CPUFSB has been problematic. It tells me that my processor has a multiplier of 5x (it's 13x and locked ) and when I twiddled with things to change the speed to the (current, BIOS-set 13x100mhz) lowest definately supportable speed of 1300mhz, my computer reset.

Dear god, this thing is running like molasses! I think it's time to set it back to a reasonable speed...