temperature monitoring

[new2overclocking]

Just a quick question: I'm getting my Iwill KK266 very soon and was wondering about the temperature monitoring features of these motherboards.

The question is, if the temp. sensors are located on the board and not the CPU, how does this in any way accurately report the processor temperature? Doesn't this just report the ambient temperature near the CPU? This could be affected by any number of things, not the least of which includes air flow paths over the sensors which do not flow over the CPU/heat sink.

Does this make any sense, or am I way off base?

 

[got_yogurt]

I dunno, do you know where they are located on the board? Perhaps they are on wires sso u can paste them wherever u want.

 

[new2overclocking]

Actually, I just looked at a closeup picture of the Iwill KK266 CPU socket. Apparently, the thermistor is located directly in the center of the socket, and it looks like it comes close to the underside surface of the CPU. But depending on how closely this is placed to the CPU surface, your readings would vary considerably. Temperature drops off by the square of the square relative to distance, I think. That is, if you're twice as far away, you're 1/16 of the temperature. Hopefully, the placement doesn't vary too much from board to board. Also, the area underneath the socket most likely will build up a good amount of heat to help "buffer" the temp. readings, but this could also be misleading.

All I'm saying is that unless you've got a thermister or thermocouple probe mounted directly between the CPU kernel and heat sink, there's no real way to tell what the temperature is on the processor itself. It's also probably safe to say that the readings of "38 deg. C" that people report is not the real temperature value acting on the CPU.

This might explain why AMD specs the CPU max. die temperature at 90 deg. C, and we continually see things fail at or below 50 deg. C. Also, even though individual CPUs are made differently, the temp. spec wouldn't vary enough between chips to really make a difference.

I guess the bottom line is that the temp readings are basically useless unless you only use them as a relative gauge to indicate when you're approaching the "upper limit" for your particular CPU/board combo. This may be predetermined by upping the speed/temp until it fails, then making sure you stay below this value with any subsequent settings.