Forgot to ask:
If it's not too off-topic, what are the steps for underclocking and lowering the core voltage of the cpu? I know if I can lower the core voltage, I can lower the temp a lot and reduce fan noise.

I'm getting an Athlon XP2000+. It's .13micron , is that a B-core?

on the shuttle, there is a bios setting for core voltage.
the settings are -.1 -.075 -.050 -.025 default +.025 +.050 +.075 and +.1. you can set the voltage to -.1 and then
figure out how fast you can run the cpu at that voltage.
it will probably actually run at that voltage at it's normal
speed, but you should test for a while, with something
like a knoppix cdrom, so you don't corrupt any files.
have lm_sensors installed so you can monitor the cpu
temp, and run the cpu at full load for hours doing
something, like making the same mp3 over and over,
or making a divx movie.
then maybe you can figure out how slow you can run
the fan or something. i have a little device that lets
me change the voltage to the cpu fan to speed it up
or slow down. i think it was from www.nexfan.com.
i ordered an athlon xp 2000 last week, and i'll be putting
it in the shuttle. i'll probably run it as fast as i can at
the lowest voltage setting.
my current athlon 1000 will run at 1000 at 1.175v.
it's just a fluke chip. it will run at 1200 at 1.5v and
1450 at 1.75.
i value the cool because it's so hot here. i live northeast
of a few acres of blacktop parking lots. the blacktop
starts 15 feet outside my window. the humidity is super
high. at 2 pm today it was 87 degrees with 65%
humidity in town. it's hotter than that at my house.
this is just mid spring. after the sun goes down the
temperature drops until the humidity hits 99%, which
is 70 degrees tonite. In a month all the rice fields will
be flooded, and mosquitos will be everywhere. I'm
sure louisiana and alabama and southest texas are
worse though, but they have beaches to drive to.
My sister moved to Maine to get away from this heat.
I should too.

I like in Western NY, so heat isn't really much of an issue 11 months of the year. When it does become a probem, I move tot he basement and my slighty OCed 2000+ stays nice and happy. I have never been bothered by the sound of my PC, which is mildly loud, but if you want a quieter rig, yeah, HSF will help, but getting a slower HD will as well.

i just got the athlon xp 2000 in. the shuttle doesn't
have a multiplier higher than 12.5, which is the default.
i upgraded the bios. same thing. right now it's running
at 1800. the default is 1666. it'll run about 1725 at the
lowest voltage. no bus speed above 145 works, so i
can't see how fast the chip will go. i set it at 5.5 and 6.0
multiplier and it actually sets the chip at 5.5 and 6.0.
I've got other motherboards i can use if i want to.

hehe, you never know with the 2000+. It's been available in Palamino core, T-bred "A" core, and "B" core. When you get it in, before you dismantle your current system, check and find out which. It's easy to tell the difference between a palamino and t-bred cores, for the difference between "A" and "B" t-breds, you have to look at the model number, the "B" core has a lower voltage. Not entirely sure what the differing models are, but do a google search, lots of places on the web to help you figure out what processor you got. Or you could install windows first and use CPU ID if you know it's a t-bred, model stepping 0="A" core, 1="B" core. There might be something similar in linux, and if so, could someone post about it? I'm not familiar with it though.

Ahhh..... props to my home state. Maine rocks.

slight

i've got to keep in mind that even though i hate the
summer, and it gets too hot to even go outside late
at night, i can play tennis outdoors comfortably for
most of december, as long as i don't wait till late at
night to play.

you can dmesg and scroll to near the top and look
for your cpu. mine says stepping 00.

Easy, decrease the FSB to 100 MHz or 66 MHz.

I thought this post was giving information to tigerflag on what motherboard to buy.

i'm horribly off topic a lot.

if the cpu says athlon on it, and it's sort of square it's
the .18 micron, i think. mine doesn't say athlon on it.
it's smooth small and twice as long as wide, and the
speed is printed on a sticker.

Didn't see where you said it's .13 micron. So it'll be Thoroughbred, the Palaminos were all .18. It's been made in "A" and "B" though, so that'll still have some affect. As someone said, you can lower your FSB to underclock, but that DRASTICALLY cuts your performance, as it also cuts into the performance of the RAM. Best way is to modify your processor to lower the multplier. There's lots of places on the web that can tell you how to do it once you figure out if it's an A or B. The B's are REALLY easy. A's are kinda annoying. If it's an A, then I would suggest lowering the multi from 12.5 to 11. This would only cost you 200 MHz, but you should with that jump be able to lower core voltage a little. If not, then 10.5, by then you would definitely be able to lower the core. When you lower the voltage, that is the biggest single thing you can do to lower the temperature of the chip. If you're getting a B core, then it might already be cool enough to run quietly, if not, underclocking to multi 11 would definitely allow it. I had a 2400+ (the #@@#ing Volcanoe 7 chipped it when I put it back in, so I had to replace it with a 2600+ 333 FSB, but I got rid of the 7 too, replaced with a 9 (which used a proper clip)) that ran BARELY over 100 Farenheight, even though I had a MUCH lower (and quieter) rpm fan on my Volcanoe 7 than stock.

That would be the "A" core then. Bet you could have easily popped that baby over 2 GHz had it been a "B"

i was just trying to show some ways to identify the chip
by the way it looks. i didn't really finish. i was just worried
about getting a .18 micron chip and made sure i got
a .13. the highest bus speed this motherboard does
stable is about 144. i've got a dozen different sticks of
ram and they all topped at the same place. you mean
to say multiplier when you said clock. this board tops
at 12.5 multiplier, and i can't set higher than that, so it
doesn't really matter for this board how high the chip
would go. I put a 1800+palamino chip in a friend's
machine a while back, and it would run stable as
fast as this 2000+ thoroughbred will. i've been
considering a new cpu for a year, but my athlon
thunderbird 1000 would overclock to 1550 if i overvolted
it. the chip i just got was really an impulse purchase. itwouldn't bother me any to buy another one if
knew i could get a lower voltage one.
this one is defaulting to 1.65,
when i read on one site that it should be 1.6.

anyway, as i get old, i care less and less about that kind
of stuff. when i was a teen, and i got in a car, i had to
know how fast it could go. now i don't care at all.
i just worry about if the pizza is going to have enough
sauce on it, or if the beer is cold.

Thanks everybody for all your good information. I really appreciate you taking the time for me. This sure turned out to be a wierd build experience. Thought I'd report back and tell y'all what I ended up with.

I got the Shuttle, then decided to just go for it and got DDR RAM. The board has been rock-solid with SDRAM and DDR. I got the B-core athlon. I sure felt my age when I tried to read the tiny letters on the chip, though! I undervolted it to -.1 and it runs at 1666 MHz. This is still almost twice as fast as my old 900 T-bird.

The board didn't fit the holes on the backplate of my case, and I didn't have any way to drill new ones. So my sainted husband dug around under the house to find my other (smaller) case. The holes in that case matched the MoBo, but I could barely fit it in. It's bigger than my other boards because it has slots for both kinds of RAM. I had to remove my CD drives and put them in the top of the case in order to be able to plug in my RAM sticks. So I had a lot of heat collecting in the top of the case.

I ordered a Falcon Rock 2 heatsink from TigerDirect and they sent me the wrong one so I sent it back and used the stock HSF from AMD. I also used a shim to protect the core. That turned out to be a bad idea. At low-intensity use the CPU was running at 150+ degrees! And it was LOUD.

I didn't like this set-up at all, so started looking for a proper Falcon Rock 2 and a case with a top blowhole and no power supply. I ended up getting a HUGE so-called mid-tower, an Enermax CS-1018. I know I went way overboard with this, but my gawd! I'm in bliss! This thing is so lovely to work in. It came with a top fan and 2 outtake fans in the back, plus had room for 2 fans in the front and 2 in the side. Hard drives mount sideways on slides to it's really easy to move them around. I stuck in 2 quiet Zalman 80mm fans, one in the front and one in the side. I also removed the chipset heatsink and replaced it with a Vantec copper chipset fan.

When I pulled off the AMD heatsink I discovered that it was barely making contact with the CPU. It only had a thin line of Artic Silver on it where it had touched the edge of the core. I'll never use a shim again.

After installing the Falcon Rock 2, which was easy to do, using the new case, and undervolting the processor, my temps now consistenly range from 91-94F case system temp, and 101-104F CPU temp! And I have to stick my ear to the case to hear it running.

I got fed up with sound problems in mandrake so installed Knoppix 3.2, and left room for Slack 9 as a "learning" distro. I gotta say, this version of Knoppix is just perfect.

So now I have a new 'confuser' that's worth more than my old car, and best of all, it's cool and I can't hear it!

Thanks again,
Siri Amrit

setpci -v -H1 -s 0:0.0 70=86
setpci -v -H1 -s 0:0.0 95=1e

enter these 2 commands and watch your cpu temp dive.

Where do I enter those commands, and what are they actually saying?

Thanks!