Okay, I am a collector of parts. Through no fault of my own I have acquired a Pentium 4 640 Prescott from an old Dell XPS machine. I'm now using that processor to build an internet computer for my wife who has been using an old AMD Athlon 2200+ for many years which is now threatening to die. The problem is I don't have a beefy heat sink for the Pentium 4, but I do have a stock heat sink from a Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 that will fit in place on the motherboard, but I doubt that it will do the job properly.

Will the stock heat sink from an Intel Core 2 Duo E7200 do the job?

Please chime in if you wish to speculate or have any experience with this problem.

Thanks!

It will fit, but I do not recommend using it due to the Pentium 4 having a significantly larger TDP than a Core 2 CPU. You would be better off buying an el-cheapo heatsink like this one or a stock P4 HSF from eBay.

Legend has it that Intel lightened up the stock HSF when they went to 65 Watt processors. Your P4 640 is up in wow it's hot in here range.

It could be argued that as long a your wife doesn't make it "think" too hard, you might skate by with it. If I needed to give it a shot, I'd do the following;

Make sure the BIOS thermal warnings were enabled

Install a good hardware monitoring program

And (my personal favorite) UNDERCLOCK that bad girl a bit

Run a program that uses all the CPU (Spybot for example) and make sure the CPU isn't thermaling back. (running at less than 100%) I think they usually cut back to about 70% usage limit

I see you're from Texas, don't know why I thought you were an Aussie. In this case you'll probably be all right until late April or early May. Start shopping/saving now though.

@Rage, I saw that Evercool unit. Apparently my aspirations were foolishly lofty when I plugged in the $10 to $25 dollar price range. That actually seems better that the pricier units.

Thanks for the replies. I'm going to run down to my local Fry's today and purchase a cheap heat sink and fan. I figured that most of you would agree with me that the stock heatsink probably wouldn't be enough.

If I feel like playing around a bit I'll try the stock fan and view the temps in the BIOS for a while. I doubt that the stock heatsink will handle an OS reinstall so I will not try to reinstall with the stock sink, but I'm interested in seeing at what temp the computer will idle at while in the BIOS.