Greg, Well yeah thta sounds about right on the OEM vs retail. I was using the Antec hurricane or whatever twister something it worked very well, but the chips do run damned hot and never had a thermo pad die on me, but well never had a processor run that fast either. Well how it died I can't say. I don't know as it was booting, but hanging at odd times. First thought was heat related, but then it would hang only after running for 30 seconds. I tried a boot floppy thinking maybe something in the kernel. No luck so now I put the new heatsink on and this is when I found it was still hanging and no heat issues it would seem. I then came bakc later and found it powers up, but no happy beeping noise. Still a few more thoughts, but even if the cpu was toast I think the bios would still generate some error messages. Got a few more things to try and then I'll decleare it dead, but well then its kind of dead yet.<grin> Scott
