Re: A PC question.

Dave Plowman: "The bios power management
page again showed the CPU overheating - going from ambient to
overheat
in
around a minute. But the heatsink was cool to the touch. ;-) "

Franc Zabkar: "There is a thermal diode on the CPU die. The diode
appears on two
pins, THERMDA and THERMDC (anode and cathode?). An external hardware
monitor chip senses the diode voltage and adds calibration factors
(eg
temperature offset) as per the CPU's Thermtrip Status Register.
Furthermore AMD's data*** states that "if the temperature sensor
has
an ideality factor different from 1.008, a small correction to this
offset is required".

Me: I vaguely recall replacing a defective temp sensing diode located
ON the motherboard. Don't remember which MB. Pull up the data*** of
the hardware monitor and trace along to the temp sensor section. A
faulty diode or peripheral component would cause the hardware monitor
chip to report "Temp Hi" to the cpu.

.