Basically, can I fry an Athlon while running NetBSD, or is there some
hardware safety cut-out if the temperature rises too much?

Longer version: I have an AMD Athlon XP 2200+ plugged into an Asus
A7V600-X motherboard. The CPU should run at 1800MHz and cooks at
85°C. The computer is dual booting - Windows 98 & NetBSD. Under
Windows, which runs asus superprobe and friends, the whole computer
closes down after a while.  I watch the temperature in superprobe
go up to about 70 °C. Under NetBSD, I can happily run for a few
hours (admittedly, that was console only, without any heavy
calculating). All this is when running at 900MHz, so I thought it
should be cool. (The fan, as supplied with the CPU, is happily
spinning at 3900 revs/min and the inside of the case is at 35°C.)

The fundamental question I'm trying to answer here is, is this a
silly Windows programme problem, or is the chip really overheating?

I would like to just run the chip at 1800MHz under NetBSD, watching
viaenv(4) and hope to say "it's fine, it's just an overzealous
windows probe programme", however, it could be that it really is
getting hot, so do I risk frying the CPU?

Cheers,

Patrick

P.S., http://vcool.occludo.net/ makes interesting reading (hmm can't
reach it just now) - are any of those registry tricks built-in to
NetBSD?