Personally I have an Athlon XP. I wish I had paid the extra and got the P4. Maybe not as fast but I wouldn't feel totally paranoid that it was gonna fry itself either. I have twice had alarms wake me up in the middle of the night saying it was at 80 deg C (I don't think they were valid temp readings as it was down at 56 deg C when I looked on the MBM 5 monitor).
It's a 1700+ (1.4GHz really) but I'm running it at 1.1GHz to try and keep it under 50 deg C most of the time. My 1GHz Duron with ti4600 outperforms it in games and such so I mainly use it as a server and for Graphics, General use.
The place I took it to get the heatsink/fan fitted (Volcano 7+) hadn't got a clue and used ALL the heatsink compound after me taking it back because they used _nothing_ between the heatsink and the chip the first time. It was dripping down the sides and in a right mess. Spent a day cleaning it up and reapplying Artic Silver instead.
I still don't know if it was damaged in that first period of switching it on and seeing it climb rapidly to 70 Deg C before I switched it off as fast as I could.
