One of my machines is using a soyo dragon motherboard with a athlon xp processor, and as of late, I've been having problems with the cpu temperature. One time, the machine shutdown becuase of the heat problem. Anyway, the mahcine usually boots with a cpu-temp of somewhere between 30-40 celsius. Soon after the boot though, the temperature rises quickly to somewhere in the range of 51-58 celsius. I think that is a bit too hot, isn't it? I have two chassis fans and a heatsink. Is there anyway I can fix this up or keep the temperature down?

60C is nowhere near maximum, i would look for hardware conflicts if your having lockups.

60C is plenty near max (at least for my system, it halts when it gets to 59C). anyhoo, did you blow out the heatsink with compressed air? i did that, and my temp went down by 45F+. you wont believe how much dust got in there . give it a try.

Max is 70 for me. I noticed that I had a lot of dust in my heatsink too. I tried to clean some of it out with a brush. This time I'll use of them air-blast cans that are used to clean out keyboards. Do you think that is dangerous?

actually max is 85c-90c depending on speed rating and if it's a barton core or not. compressed air is fine as long as you don't spin the fan with the air(compressed air will spin the fan faster than it's rated and damage it). shut down, keep the fan from turning with your finger, and blast away.

unless you hold the thing upside down, up. if you do, it sprays out that mixture, which, you know, is REALLY cold. im not sure if the stuff will hurt the heatsink, but i dont wanna find out. but, if you hold it right side up, it works like a charm. blow in between those fans, but dont scrape in there . you probably have a pillow-full of dust. i did .

The maximum temperature of processors depends on many things. One the stepping. Next the core architecture. Third humidity. Fourth, sometimes altitude. Fifth, power regulation and filtering.

Soyo motherboards is not know to have a good power supply, so the processor can be unreliable when it is reaching high temperatures.

The cold temperatures of the compressed air will not effect the heatsink. You probably want to take off the heatsink and do a thorough cleaning. If you are using silicon heatsink grease or other thermal compounds, its good time to replace it. They do get dry and this can reduce their effectines to remove heat from the processor. Make sure you put a thin coat.