Remember WAAAAAAY back in the days of windows 95/98 when they came out with those programs Rain and Waterfall?  Here's an odd little question, WTF happened to the low power mode on CPUs?  Serously, I remember taking a Cyrix 6X86 (a real power hungry CPU for its day) and once the OS had loaded, running Rain and REMOVING the heatsink.  It had absolutely no problem with that either.  As long as nothing was running, it used next to no power and made very little heat.

Now, I have this dual P4.  Don't get me wrong, its a fantastic processor (currently running at 3.2 while I do some tests) and with an ENORMOUS heatsink but at no load, the thing's just sucking down power like a... a... like some kind of power sucking thing that doesn't do anything.  Did someone lose track of the goal of that...to save power?  Because lemme tell you, there's an assload of power to be saved on a dual core P4.  Seriously, it's enough to keep this thing at 50C at idle while a half grapefruit sized heatsink wizzes along under the air being blown in from yet another fan above it (haven't had time to run a duct yet, fans are easier)  Anyway, it just seems a little silly to have an idle CPU not go into low power mode during the idle loop.

In other news about the system.  It's unstable at 3.4ghz (although it boots with no problems even at 3.5).  It doesn't crash, it just resets.  Just before it resets, the Vcore drops by about 10%, so I'm thinking it's either the power supply, the voltage regulators on the motherboard overheating...or I suppose it could be that the board just can't supply 200 watts.  I'll try adding heatsinks to the regulators (a good idea on any motherboard) and/or adding a second power supply to see if either of those fix the problem.  It SEEMS that other than whatever caused those issues it SHOULD work at 3.5ghz, possibly more.