Pentium 4 HT 524 overclocking

I do not think that the Stock cooler will do very well. Pentium 4s get really hot, especially after 2.8 ghz.

Is there anything I can use to monitor the temperature. I tried a few programs like HWmonitor and speedfan, but they don't work.

Definitely upgrade your cpu cooler if you plan to overclock.

If you have a Pentium 4 524 it is NOT a socket 478.......it is LGA 775. Intel Pentium 4 5xx and 6xx series were the very first generation of LGA 775 chips.
You will as stated above need aftermarket cooling to get a decent overclock out of it and to be honest it will not really help much. Those chips were not even very good new. I know I had a 530. Save your money for a new system.

Speedfan should work just fine with a P4 even an older one than that. It has been around forever. You might try Realtemp or something newer like Speccy or PC Wizard 2010.

http://www.piriform.com/products

http://www.cpuid.com/softwares/pc-wizard.html

I made a mistake. I have a Pentium 4 3.06. That should change everything. BTW, pc-wizard doesn't work. I will try speccy later. question still up, is stock fan OK since it's not the lousy socket 775 ones.

Actually that is kind of worse.........you have a processor from 2002 and not from 2005. The LGA 775 chips were of a newer smaller manufacturing process that made them run cooler. Back then a good overclock was maybe 500mhz so you might get 3.5 out of it with good cooling. So stuff from 2002 will run a bit faster. It is an old chip that lacks the newer instruction sets that make todays CPUs run todays software so well. Check this out.....they are excited about a 300mhz overclock!

http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/p43000/default.asp

I wouldnt waste money or time on trying to get much more out of this chip. It has been obsolete for years and is not getting any newer. It was the fastest thing on the block.....8 years ago. But today it is about useless except for internet browsing. Moore's law.....computer power doubles every 2 years.

It is how you move the air around the case. intake front low with a extra fan pulling on the outside of case from fan from cpu. Power supply fan is most crucial. PCI slot fans are cheap and do wonders. Kind of hard to avoid the Windtunnel effect if you dont have fan control. If your handy a lighted rocker SPST switch (20 or 30 amp) on some of the exhaust and intake fan wires mounted on the case can be handy when idling and watching movies. Just need a drill,wire strippers and a dream.

B.T.W.
I love when somebody calls a highend P4 "sbout useless).
Funny my fiance's P4 2.4 with xp pro streams movies from my tower on a 108mbps Super G and at the same time records with a tv tuner/composite vid cam and can "internet browse" at the same time (even play some tetris too)
A little lag but definitely not "useless"
I ran dual Xeon 3.06 (essentially same chip) in a Dell Precision 450 until recently and benched about 9400 in 3dmark03 which is equal to core2duo's/9800gt combo's
Crysis will play on a P4 3.0 with a 7000 series nvidia (minimum settings).
Unless your talking about heavy graphic Maya type stuff in a business evironment but on a home enthusiast level a P4 3.0 higher HT still will work.
"useless except for browsing" is just plain Wrong