I've just put together a new 8.1 system but after 20 hours of operation the system failed. Details: ASUS A7V333 motherboard AMD Athlon AX-1800 processor with Speeze cooling fan (3 wire/ ball bearing) installed 512 MB DDR RAM and the rest is probably unimportant. After approximately 20 hours up time the system froze solid. Upon reboot the motherboard reported "system failure, CPU out" repeatedly until I turned the power off. Thinking it could be just an over heat problem, I let it stand overnight and tried again only to get the same verbal report from the motherboard. I disassembled the unit, removed the cpu, and exchanged it for another. This morning as I prepared to reassemble the box, I noted upon wiping off the heat sink compound from the bottom of the cooling fan, that etched on the surface was all the information from the center of the CPU, i.e., AMD Athlon, AX-1800DMT3C, AGOIA02288PAW, Z16622860122, 1999 AMD, but backwards which suggests to me that it got so hot that the chip info was transferred to the base of the cooling fan. The board, CPU, RAM, and cooling fan were all purchased from a dealer (Tiger Direct) who recommended the fan for the CPU. The fan came with a packet of heat sink compound already on its base, so I didn't add any additional. The motherboard has verbal warnings for CPU overheat, and is supposed to shut the system off if the CPU starts to get too hot. Neither of these things happened. The bios has setting for clocking chips up to 2300, but the best I could get from this combination was using auto setup at 1500, well under its rated speed. My question is, I guess, have I done something wrong, did I just have a fluky CPU, did under clocking cause a problem, or am I way off track. Any advice greatly appreciated. tia, dave -- David C. Johanson Linux Counter # 116410 Powered by SuSE Linux 7.1 People who behold a phenomenon will often extend their thinking beyond it; people who merely hear about the phenomenon will not be moved to think at all. -- Goethe