One should note that the 'retail' heatsink for a processor should keep it at a reasonable temperature, provided that the case has adequate airflow. (And, of course, that the CPU has not been overclocked)

Agreed.

Tho, Hussar never mentioned who assembled the proc to the HSF and their level of expertise and if they used the heat sink compound or tape that was supplied.

For all we know here is that gkrellm (which could be wrong) is reporting higher than usual temperatures for a non-overclocked pc.

He's yet to tell us his MOBO's temperatures.

I've seen numerous times, that a person applied the thermal compound in too much quantity, and effectively squeezed it all out. Only to "rear it's ugly head" over time gradually, then bang. I've seen thermal pad's just get rock solid hard for no explainable reason, and led to their in-effectiveness.

You may want to drop in some "new" thermal compound, or arctic silver is truly even better (~10 $ US ) at a store and put it in there and clean your HSF as someone else pointed out. Do not use a compressed air can, that has a tendency to moisten the air and actually make your dust cling to the surface more.

Hussar you do mention high ambient temperatures there. Remember, an HSF is an "air to air" heat exchanger. The law's of heat transfer govern your over all results. You can expect at best a 6-8 deg F lowest temperature of the cpu compared to the room the pc's actually sitting in. The only way to get lower than that 6-8 norm is a huge HSF with a really big fan, or go water cooling. Laws of thermodynamics tell us that heat only flows from high temp to low, so even the best air to air heat exchanger will give you 1 to 2 degrees diffrence, for all that noise, weight on the mobo and cost and rarely proves prudent.

Water cooling, or heat pipe are some other nice solution's depending on your budget, and might be a good solution if your running a server as you mention. I dont know how 'mission critical' your server is, but it might be worth considering.

And in case you ever get the urge to overclock that bad boy, AMD's leave a lot of overhead in their Athlon XP's for cycles, just not temperature. 2600+ OC's really nicely, as do their FSB can run well above 400.

Yeah, I'm a big fan of arctic silver for heatsink-cpu interface. Even using a stock heatsink, arctic silver drops the temperature 2-5 deg C versus a thermal pad (both properly installed).

Yeah arctic silver is fantastic. Just don't get it on your hands, it takes a long time to get it off. But I think that's one of the reason's why I like it too to be honest. Many of the white compounds that ship with HSF are just goopy and runny, and can easily get all over the place.

I actually got a few more degrees from jumping to their 10% over the 5%. I can still only get my cpu to be about 11 degrees above the room the pc sits in with liveable sound from the fans. I aim to be under 90dB, which is hard. These manufacturere's just lie about their fans LOL. Their's 8 octove bands, and they just put on the label the lowest of the 8 octave bands, when really it's the first three that matters...but far too much info for this thread LOL bye for now.

When I work with heatsinks and the like, I wear powder-free latex gloves to avoid getting fingerprints on the hardware (which can actually cause issues) and to keep the arctic silver off my hands.

Me to for the most part...unless I cant find them on my cluttered workbench, then I turn to "ye ole faithful sandwhich bags LOL" and a credit card to smooth it all out. I'm a true hack-er.

You should see my wind tunnel for my cpu...duct tape and plexi-glass with a hack job - plastic weld via solder gun ROFL..whatever it takes to 'git-her-done'

Nothing wrong with the cheap Socket A heatsinks on Newegg, as long as you dig out the few that are solid copper.

As for the stock Athlon coolers... well, they just weren't that great. Athlon XPs ran hotter than their 64 bit successors, and the latter have better stock cooling. I would consider a stock XP cooler to be barely above adequate for normal computing loads.

For example, with that heatsink I linked, my XP 2800+ ran at 40 celcius. My dual-core Opteron OC'd to 2.5GHz on each core idles at 28-30.

One other often overlooked thing that could help a hot system run a bit better is a northbridge cooler. Im not entirely sure of how well it helps but i cant imagine any chip runs well at 60C, especialy if its overclocked. All i usualy do is peel the heatsink off, scrape off the crappy compound or tape they put on, lil drop of arctic silver, and throw something like a 38mm fan on it.

Only slightly off topic, has anyone ever considered some type of air filter for their case fan? After about a month, i usualy have some pretty hefty dust bunnies rolling around inside my case and i know that is detrimental to the cooling. Im not sure how to go about this keeping maximum air-flow in mind.