Is my Pentium III @ 450 MHz. Slot 1 getting old and tired in summer?

After discovering that spurious and unexpected hangs were traceable to poor communication between the CPU and the memory (syslog helped the discovery), the solution came disabling the external cache within the BIOS Setup utility.

This problem happens only with room temperatures above 28 centigrade. But the CPU itself is properly cooled and the heatsink is not much hot. The problem, I believe is that the chip with the 512 K of L2 cache is at the side of the CPU and not in contact with the main heatsink.

Is this a known problem of the Slot 1 Pentiums?

Some other solution exists?

Have you tried adding another fan to blow at that part of the CPU? (Keep in mind overall case airflow). What kind of CPU temps do you get?

I haven't.

That part is quite inaccessible to external air flow. The chip is on the printed circuit board, in the components side. But in contact with the CPU in the center there is the big heatsink. The clearence from the heatsink to the 512 K chip is about 5 mm. On the other side there is a plastic cover with an holographic autenticity seal.

My motherboard (an AX6BC from AOpen) doesn't show temperatures. But you can keep your hand over the heatsink without discomfort. So it shall not be above 50 degrees centigrade.

I have come to think that the circuitry of that cache must be more temperature sensible than the circuitry in standard memory boards. The unpredictable and spuriously way that the problem happens makes me think so.

I don't believe in a permanent damage because the performance is OK with normal room temperatures.

Also, the problem can be related to the operation of the quartz crystal clock. The piezoelectric effect is quite sensible to temperature and perhaps the unexpected presence of some undesirable harmonic can trigger the cache failure.

Most probably, the cache failure has to be traced to several concurrent causes.

By the way, I will keep my cache disabled until the end of summer!