its an amd athlon XP 1500+.

the temperature is 70'C and I started getting the beeping alert.
I set it at bios to start alerting at 80'C. But I'm just wondering. Is my temperature too high?

I would never run my Athlon at 70C.
80C may be hot enought to totally fry your CPU, I don't know what your particular CPU was designed to take.

The beeping didn't tell you enough then ?

Turn it off, allow to cool, etc.

"Technically" your cpu should be able to cope with temperatures up to about 120'C, but really, you never should go over 65'C, I keep mine at 40'C evern when overclocked, id say something has gone wrong with yours, might need to replace the thermal paste [img]smile.gif[/img]

An XP1500 should not be running that hot really (it won't do any harm, but for the speed of the chip etc. it just shouldn't be). Might be worth popping open the case and make sure the chipset fan is still spinning, and everything is dandy, try cleaning dust out of the case as a "quick fix" if all appears ok.

<font color=skyblue>In normal operation, my PC heat stays at around 40C. When I am doing high-level stuff like moving my video onto the HDD, I heat up to like 60C.

The only day I actually ever received an alert for overheating (and it was in the red level), was the day I got a trojan that bypassed my securities and it somehow overheated my PC all the while trying to convince me to buy an anti-spyware software to get rid of whatever. Once the trojan was gone, the PC lost its fever. </font>

Just remember... a replacement cooling fan is cheap. A replacement CPU isn't... I'd spend a few bucks to change the fans across the board -- CPU, case, and so on. It'd still be cheaper.

Having said that, this machine has been on all day, and is sitting at 37C. 70C should be telling you something...

I'm curious... how do you find the temperature of your PC?

My motherboard came with a hardware monitoring tool... I clicked on it, and it told me. I don't know that my older machines have the same kind of tool, though.