You are looking at it entirely wrong.

Do you have stability problems right now?

No? - No prob

Yes? - Are they temp related or another issue?
If problems, have you done a memtest?



I see temp questions all the time, I think this is a common thing for new people trying to learn as much as they can, there is nothing wrong with that, we were all there. But temperatures are FAR OVERRATED. Unless you are overclocking, temperatures mean almost nothing, this is true because all the stock heatsinks and stock designs for vid cards are made to run within the manufacturers specifications!

Since this question got asked, I'm going to make the guess that you aren't overclocking, your temps are fine, your rpms are fine, ect.

P4s run hot as hell anyway, unless you have lockups that you can directly relate to your temps this entire thread is a nonissue.

There is no fan on Earth that can cool a 3000GHz P4, so you should give up your search.

RPMs are irrelevant. A well made fan @ 2500 RPMs can have more CFMs (airflow) than a poorly design fan @ 3500 RPMs. And no one can tell you what you need because the ambient temperature of your case, home and geographical region will vary. If you want to use a slower fan, get a better, bigger heatsink (Stock Intel heatsink isn't that great) and get some good thermal compound.

Your stock fan should be 'good enough' and if it isn't, clean the dust from your heatsink/fan and reseat it with some fresh thermal paste.

If you're getting restarts after that, you either live in a hot place without air conditioning or you have another problem.. like a bad PSU, failing memory or a slew of other issues.

We used to use those same exact heatsinks at Intel in the validation lab. At the time, they were using them on 3.6GHz Prescotts (Substantially hotter than your P4, I'm sure) and they run stable for days at a time with a fairly puny fan. I don't believe a change of heatsink should be necessary.

If it IS a heat issue, you should be able to reproduce it by loading your system for about 15 minutes until it reaches its maximum temperature. Memtest does a pretty good job of this, so if it run for hours, heat is probably not the problem.

Incidentally, about two weeks ago, I was working on a P4 3.0 GHz HP Media Center PC and it had a 'screen blanking' issue. I would boot into Windows and the screen would go blank sometimes... sometimes immediately, other times over a period of hours. I couldn't reproduce it reliably, but when this happened, it would never POST (blank screen) after a restart. I just let it have to sit for awhile and then it would start working again. Also, sometimes even when it did work fine, I would restart it and it would not POST.

What did I do to get the computer back on? Other than just letting it fix itself (had to leave it alone for several minutes to a few hours), the only solution that seemed to work 100% of the time was to unplug ATX connector from motherboard... and no, unplugging the AC cable out of the power supply didn't work either.

The problem kept coming back. I tried another power supply and the problem seemed to go away temporarily. Sure enough though, it happened again.

The CPU was running pretty hot, so I reinstalled it with some fresh thermal paste. The problem didn't come back for awhile; however, it started happening again. I put a large fan on it and run it full blast to rule out a cooling issue - again, the screen would still blank and the computer would not POST afterward until I either waited a couple of hours or pulled the ATX connector out of the board.

As it turns out, reseating the memory, reseating the heatsink, reseating the PCI cards were all things that seemed to fix it, although temporarily. Eventually, I noticed that ANY reasonable amount of pressure I put on the system board seemed to fix the issue. My guess? Something needed to be reworked on the board because some component wasn't making good contact.

The solution was to replace my client's system board. It's been about 1.5 weeks and the issue has not reoccurred since. The problem has a striking similarity to yours, so I thought you might like to hear that.

I can't say replacing your board is the answer for sure, but if what you said is true about replacing the PSU etc... Based on my experience posted above... It sounds likely.

Regardless, either way it is a great excuse to upgrade