I couldn't resist the price cuts, and just replaced my AMD 3800 dual-core 2 GHz processor with the 4800 2.5 GHz model, along with AMD's stock heatsink-fan assembly. This is a new PC that I built two months ago for rendering with Poser 7 SR1.1 on Windows XP x64, using an ABit NF-M2 nView motherboard with 2 GB of RAM.

I installed the new processor-heatsink-fan assembly and ran "CPU Test" for two hours with no errors this morning. Then I started rendering more sequential images for an animation I'm working on. About ten minutes later, I heard the alert bell sounding from the next room and rushed back, fearful of the worst.

Happily, there was no smoke, not even an error message on screen, but the bell didn't stop until I clicked Poser's Cancel button. I found that the BIOS default rings the alert if the core reaches 80 C, and shuts things down completely at 90 C. That's hot!

I underclocked the processor from 2.5 to 2.0 GHz a few hours ago, and it is still happily rendering frames as I write this message on my old backup computer. I know that rendering puts quite a load on a CPU, and I've read that AMD processors tend to run warm, but I'm guessing that this processor-heatsink-fan assembly is defective, and I'm planning to return it.

Has anyone else here had trouble with overheating their PC while rendering?

Thanks,
Ricky