Christmas cleaning
Paolo | 04/01/2008 | 0:51 
For Christmas I made some cleaning in my PC, so I removed a SCSI CD burner, with its interface complete of the bulky cable, and the glorious floppy disk drive, unused since many years.
The first and more visible consequence was a drastic reduction of the CPU temperature, dropped of about 20°C (36°F), from 65°C (149°F) to 45°C (113°F).
I always considered my AMD Athlon 64 processor the only responsible for the high temperature, even in normal condition of working, without CPU intensive tasks. I was wrong: the very bulky SCSI cable was probably the guilty.
Second and less important consequence was the considerably reduced boot time: I have no precise measurements but under both Linux and Windows the driver of the SCSI interface took several seconds to initialize.
So the quote of Henry Ford «Whatever you have, you must either use or lose» is still true today!
20°C? Did you replaced the CD burner with a cover or
Pasckosky20°C?
Did you replaced the CD burner with a cover or you left the slot open?
It’s easy to imagine such temperature difference if you shut down a disk, or if you remove it, but removing a component that should be idle for 99.999999% of the time is quite strange.
Anyway old components and old boards did not consider heating a big problem (there were bigger problems such as performances).
On the loading time, that is predictable. Each component take time to startup. SCSI takes a lot of time (I’ve seen this on many controllers), both at BIOS time and operating system time.
You did good removing them, just keep the floppy reader somewhere. It is rare, but sometimes it might be necessary.
No, I closed both slots (CD burner and floppy) with
PaoloNo, I closed both slots (CD burner and floppy) with a plastic cover. The issue wasn’t with the heat produced by the two devices, but rather with the fact that the SCSI cable is very long and bulky, and prevented the air from freely flowing in the case.