Formatting will do nothing if you have updated your BIOS, Updated your motherboard chipset drivers and nothing has worked at all as well as applying the paste and this is still hot and you have all those fans .. There is a definate problem somewhere I believe it will point to the motherboard itself. The only question I have not asked do you have the older prescott chip???

let me know

not sure how old it is, system is <1 yr. it's a 3.0 ghz 512l2 cache so its not the 1mb or 2mb. *shrug*

I thought you upgraded from an older mobo with the same install of XP and old drivers.

What's the room temp?

just thought id let anyone know that i fixed the problem. i got rid of that peice of ****ing **** motherboard and popped in my mates' ga-8siml 2.0. it's a peice of **** as well, but it runs very stably and its giving me CPU temps of around 42 C which makes me endlessly happy. i am going to go to the highest building in sydney and throw my asrock motherboard out the window. i am then going to the store from which i bought it and where they checked it and said it was in perfect working order (i have this in writing) and urinate on their front door, or at the very least, let them know they are useless and i will never shop there again. the only problem i have now is, well, 2, is that my mobo thinks my CPU is 1.5ghz instead of 3.0. ive got HT on though so turning it off may help. also, i have no sound, as there are no drivers for this mobo. lemme know if you find some. cheers.

Glad to see you are kinda ok now .. It was said earlier in the post the old motherboard was not good there not know for great boards this is why they are so cheap.. Now for the problem now that motherboard has to support hyperthreding for it to work . I would take old board back or send it back and get a different one they will do something if you push them...