That may actually be good advice!
The advice as given might be possible, but was incomplete in
one crucial area- it may still run too hot to simply "unplug
the fan", and further, if the fan isn't running it should be
removed entirely, and further, a different type of heatsink
is usually used for best results in passive cooling (tall
widely spaced tines, instead of short rows of fins). Then
add a duct to direct air.
The motherboard of the pc I want to
replace is an asus p2b-ds.
Once again it would've been good if you had just provided
full information up front. It doesn't matter if you
understand why or not, that's so OTHER people can fully
asses the situation and make suggestions. Remember, nobody
is compelling you to do anything, but the only way to get
the high quality answers is to provide ALL information. So
far it is ridiculous how much time has been spent and we are
only now uncovering that you may well have a board that
would do as you need (except we still dont' actually know
what performance level you need for this mystery task).
I don't think the bios will allow me to
under clock it, though...
Did you check?
Most Asus boards will, except the OEM ones, though often
there are jumpers to do it, not bios settings... but
actually the jumpers are even better than bios settings for
this purpose.
There's more than one way to skin a cat though, you don't
actually need a board that supports underclocking to
underclock a P2 chip... but then once again, you have failed
to provide detail- what CPU was in that board. If it had a
100MHz FSB, it's trivial to cover up a pin or cut the
connecting trace to force it into 66MHz FSB mode, which of
course results in 2/3 of the original spec'd CPU clockspeed.
The thing is, clockspeed reduction is not as effective at
reducing heat as voltage reduction is. The idea underclock
scenario is one where the voltage is the thing you target
for reduction, and the clockspeed is the secondary concern,
it is lowered enough to get the target voltage stable. I'm
thinking of more modern platforms though, if you went with
that board with the multiplier locked pentium 2 processors,
you can't change that multiplier and the only clockspeed
reduction left is as mentioned above, dropping from 100 to
66 MHz FSB.
I was hoping that there were some newer
procs that consumed less power for their processing capability...
There are, the topic had shifted from a generic idea about
low heat towards the specifics of what you really needed...
at which point you decided to be counterproductive. It's
highly likely you have no idea what CPU performance level
you actually need and the more important factor is the
platform (mainly, motherboard) features. So it would be for
a general purpose fileserver, for example, that even a
Pentium 100 would suffice- but a pentium 100 compatible
motherboard lacks some other important features like large
HDD support, ACPI capable bios, ATX PSU support (in most
cases), possibly not supporting 128MB of memory, etc. It
may well be that the only thing that mattered was the
motherboard you chose, when instead you are only specifying
the CPU and refusing to come clean about what you need.
Low heat isn't a primary concern, there are many ways to get
there. Nobody here is going to be willing to spend the
weeks, months, even years to tell you about all the possible
ways to get an end result of low heat with all the myriad
parts that exist which are capable of low performance tasks.
Instead, given ALL the details, participants in the forum
can make the best suggestions. Without all the details,
it's just a random shot in the dark.
