Thermal testing is highly recommended when choosing a new supplier for motherboards or chassis, or when starting to use new products. To begin determining the best thermal solution for your Pentium II Xeon processor based systems, contact your motherboard vendor for chassis and fan configuration recommendations. Testing Hints Use the following hints to reduce the need for unnecessary thermal testing. Processors that dissipate the most power will generate the most heat. By testing the warmest processor supported by the motherboard you can avoid additional testing with processors that generate less heat with the same motherboard and chassis configuration.
Power dissipation varies with processor speed and silicon stepping.
To ensure selection of the appropriate processor for your system thermal testing, refer to Table 1 for power dissipation numbers for boxed Pentium II Xeon processors. Integrators should test systems with some expansion cards installed in order to simulate a system that has been upgraded. A thermal management solution that works well in a system that is heavily loaded does not need to be re-tested for lightly loaded configurations.