Chip Temperature Controller

[Bobo23]

I always hear people talking about chips overheating and about temperature's chips run at. I have a few questions and suggestions. My friend built a PC with a 1.3ghz athlon thunderbird and he had a heatsink and fan on the chip and it still overheated frying the chip and the motherboard. I was thinking, you never really know if your chip is overheating until its too late, right. So why not set up some sort of mechanism to regulate the temperature. You wouldn't even have to have it do anything except read the temperature on the inside and display it on the outside. A simple thermometer with a wire to a LCD displaying temperature would work good. So I guess my questions are...

1. How do you take the chips temperature, is it just the outside temperature, or is it inside. Could you just tape a thermometer to the outside of it? It would of course not be a standard glass thermometer, it would be more like a wire. I have seen these in stores.

2. What is an appropriate temperature for a P4 to run at, and when is it too hot and time to turn it off and let it sit. Same for AMD Athlon.

I just think this could be done for about a cost of $5. We could save a lot of people the trouble of buying a new chip and motherboard because they didn't know until it was too late.
Thoughts, questions, comments?

[Hpro]

do you mean somthing like this one,in the attached picture ?

[Bobo23]

YES where did you get that and how much did it cost?

[Alfie]

You can get them at any cooling specialist outlet.
They do work and have an accuracy of +/- 1c.
The best way to attach them is to tape it on the cpu so that the end of it touches the cpu slug.
Another alternative is to drill a small hole in your heatsink,so that the thermisistor sits directly above the cpu slug.
I use one and have a cut out in one of the spare coverings on the front of my computer.
This way I always have a readable and fairly accurate output of cpu temp.
they cost about $10-$12.00 + shipping.

[Hpro]

I also use the one you saw in the picture it is inserted between heatsink and CPU which is a easy task on the P-Pro heatsinks - and the sensor is hold with a small clamp I made .. it's readout is OK but I think it should responds a bit faster but anyway you can't buy the world for ten bucks.. I'm far away from the states or where you live so you may have to watch out at the local computer store..