If you're following my latest adventures, I built a Dell Inspiron 530 with an X5460 under the hood. It's a sweet rig, except it runs hot. In HW Monitor, it is showing the CPU's clock speed as a constant 3158MHz. Is it possible to force this processor to dynamically clock itself? If that can be done, I am sure it will help a lot with the CPU cooling problem I'm experiencing.
My AMD FX 6300 can throttle-down after a take a load off it and it cools rapidly. At idle, it runs really cool and quiet, even with a noisy, stock cooler.
It may have a setting that keeps it at turbo speeds aslong as the thermals are ok, I know that some old dell workstations did that and ASUS still does it on their WS boards.
Take a look in your BIOS for Intel SpeedStep and see if that's turned on. My 771 xeons have an option for it and it was off by default. It might help to have it on to reduce heat and power usage.
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I don't remember seeing speedstep in the BIOS. The motherboard is a G33M03. I'm going to try performing a BIOS upgrade.
I upgraded the BIOS with the newest version from Dell for this board. I think it's 1.0.15. The motherboard came out of a Vostro 400 and the machine started life as an Inspiron 530.
I did manage to go into the power settings in windows 7 and set the maximum processor state to 60% It's only been on for a few minutes, but it's not screaming at me yet. Hopefully, that will help.
At least it wasn't as bad as an A6 5400. That thing ran hotter than anything I've ever seen.