Heat sink, or not to heat sink ?
 

Today my new slackware box was born :) well it's not really a box, it's more lying about on the floor in bits; but all connected and working (I power on with a piece of fusewire, for those who wondered, all very arcane and good fun).

It is a pentium 200 ... plus other bits and so forth. I've seen quite a few of them, some with hs/fan, some bare. Mine is bare. I ran it for 3 hours today, installed slack, no instability. But I touched it after I shutdown and it was hot enough to burn me. I think it must have been 50 - 60 degrees, perhaps more. What is the accepted wisdom here for a pentium 200 ?

Don't touch it :p

I have a heat sink on my P200mmx smoothwall box.

Really ?
 

So, you have a heat sink on yours, but advise me not to worry about mine ?

No I meant "Don't touch it" as in you'll burn yourself. (That was my 1 liner that failed misserably)

I would probably put something on if you are worried. The chances are that it will run fine though. At work we have a server that runs an AMD proccessor at 90*

You can try finding a better heatsink for socket 6 (I think). Also you can try putting a fan on the heatsink, but there is hidden physics behind active heatsink designs. If the fan is too close, the air will be trapped between the fins. Also the smaller the sindle (the center) of the fan, the smaller the hot spot.