Yeah, 45 is still in the safe zone. Although some more cooling would extent the lifetime and the performance a bit. The Pentium 4's all have heat protection. This involves the cpu being put into a lower speed when it get's too hot. So you don't get the risk that it will burn. But if you want to extend life and perfomance maybe you should look into a better cooler or some better cooling paste. :)

45 c will be the normal temp under no load...once you start making the processor work some more it will rise in temp...very normal.

If it stays at 45, that's good!

Indeed, I recommend cleaning off the thermal sticker they have on the heat sink and buying the Arctic Silver Thermal Paste...called ASIII

Helps greatly!

Opus :D

Oh yeah, please tell us how the system is...
very curious to know if the 3Ghz P4 800Mhz CPU has any problems in any way

Opus

Since you asked...

The system configuration is:

* Intel P4 3.0 Ghz CPU with the 800 Mhz front side bus
* Gigabyte 8KNXP motherboard with dual channel DDR support (Intel canterwood chipset - over 6 Gigabyte/sec bandwidth to memory), onboard IDE raid (4 seperate IDE connnectors), 8 USB2 channels, Firewire interface, onboard SATA raid, Gigabit ethernet, etc.
* 1 gigabyte of 433 Mhz Crucial DDR memory (2 sticks of 512 Mb each)
* 120 Gig 7200 RPM 8meg buffer Maxtor disk for the OS
* 80 Gig 7200 RPM 8 meg buffer Maxtor disk for scratch data
* 2 removable 80 Gig 7200 RPM 8 meg buffer Maxtor disks for audio data
* Enermax 550 watt power supply
* Plextor Premium CD writer (52x32x52 - also has a special mode where it writes over 900 megs to regular disks)
* Sony DVD writer (supports -R, -RW, +R, and +RW)
* Matrox G550 video card (has two monitor outputs built in)
* US Robotics modem
* 2 NEC 17" monitors
* keyboard, mouse, floppy, cheapo ($19!) case

* UAD-1 card for effects
*Audio interface: Aardvark Direct Pro 24/96

I use Sonar 2.2 and Cool Edit Pro 2.1 for my audio work. I use Ozone for final tweaking (I won't call it mastering until I get a lot better ;) ). I also use Antares Autotune (not installed on this system yet, and yes, I got a new copy because of the PACE protection). I use either CEP or EasyCD platinum 5.x for CD burning. The latest version of EasyCD knew about both of my drives. (The Sony drive is the OEM version of the 500A)

I haven't actually used the UAD-1 much yet. I'm not currently using the gigabit ethernet, firewire, serial ports, or parallel port so I have them disabled in the bios.

I ordered the system from NewEgg.com last Monday. I paid an extra $2.99 for "rush" processing. They shipped the same day. The boxes were on my doorstep the next day. I am VERY pleased with the service I got from them. I was going to order the monitors locally to save on shipping, but they had a special of free shipping on the monitors I got, so no worries!

I've spent the weeknights after work this week plugging everything together slowly and methodically, and installing the software.

I booted up Sonar, fixed up the audio inputs/outputs, rebooted a couple of times. Then I tried messing around with Sonar. Whoooooeeeee!!!! I haven't even started tweaking XP yet but MAN O MAN what a wonderful beast this computer is! I was able to move the latency slider all the way down and all the way up, and while the CPU usage went up and down, the system stayed totally stable. I expect that if I run the UAD effects, I can put the latency at the absolute minimum with no problems.

I used CEP for a few hours to take a live Jazz Band performance and normalize it, tweak it, seperate it into tracks and burn a couple of CDs. Smmmmokin! On my old system (1.9 gHz P4 - not a total slouch), it would take about 30 seconds to do the full statistical normalization on a 3.5 minute song. On this monster it took 30 seconds to do it on the full 25 minute piece!

So far, I have had ZERO problems related to CPU/Memory/Motherboard. I had one small glitch after installing the Plextor software - the CD and DVD got flaky, and would sometimes not read. I took it out again, and they were fine with the normal OS drivers. I'll have to check out the Plextor site for an update, but I can't blame that on the processor.

I had one tiny problem initially. The memory bandwidth is so fast (>6 Gbytes/sec) that the memory test screen flashed up and down so fast I didn't even see it! It didn't pause long enough to display "press del to go into setup". I got into setup fine anyway because I knew what to do, and just started pressing del repeatedly as soon as I feed the monster power.

One interesting thing - Running a test mix on Sonar, I don't get any difference in CPU usage from using the Matrox 550 in 16-bit versus 32-bit, so I left it in 32-bit.

I am one HAPPY camper with this system so far.

-lee-

Wow....sounds great!

Indeed you won't see a difference on 16 vs 32 bit on the graphics as the bandwidth is plenty on the PCI bus now....

I'm happy with my system for now, my next system will be next year with the PCI Express protocol...at that point it's going to be two fold what you are seeing now!

Cheers and thanks for the report

Opus :D

I have a Asus P4C800 delux. all good and fast but the only problem that mede me come unstuck is the AGP Pro slot.

My system just not power up at all with my Matrox G400 in there, further investigation reveals that this slot does not suport 3.3 Volt agp cards, only +0.8V or +1.5V AGP cards.

I got my Asus 7100 video card from home and that works fine but it means Im back to 1 screen, so Im now shopping for a new dual head card. Prehaps the G550 may be the go. Its hard because those volt specs are not mentiond in the advertizing very often. So watch out.

If I may intrude I must, since I also have the
P4P800 Dlx.Frankly I'd not omit any connectorsin a set I was calling "Deluxe", but what do I know. I will be adding two WD360 Raptors to this
HP Pavilion533w, not that it will matter afterwards who the retailer of my "case"&"face" was. I will be at a standstill/study pace, at least until I afford a proper power supply to augment this thing.
I must admit I am a little confused as to my implementation of current IDE drives and the two
Raptrs in sata raid 0. I think what I am aiming for is within these components abilities, but I wish someone would hold my hand. So far I have gone into unfamiliar areas, ok, though very slowly
since I paid for this stuff with "notyet" cash, if yas know what I mean.

Jeff,

may I ask what serious issues you had with your system that made you go for (yet unproven) serial ATA technologies, even having to pay with "not yet" cash ?

Just wondering, as I am probably an entire generation behind the bleeding edge and have not seen any real bottlenecks with my system ... :roll:

MisterBlue.

I thought I'd post an update on my experiences now that I've used the system for a few sessions.

In general - totally rocking.

In specific, I had one problem with audio going away after using it for a while - then I'd need to reboot the entire box and it was fine again. I ended up contacting tech support for Aardvark, and they recommended that I disable hyperthreading in the bios. I have done that, and so far it seems to have fixed the problem. (Its hard to prove the absence of an intermittent problem) I don't know if the hyperthreading was an issue with Aardvark, the UAD, or Sonar. I doubt if it was Sonar because Intel touts Sonar as an application that works well with hyperthreading.

The good news is that the system is so fast, that didn't make a big difference for the work I'm doing now. The CPU hovers around 1-2%... I think I can live with that. ;)

-lee-