Hi!

I just upgraded the CPU in a Dimension 8300 to a Pentium 3.0HT, and
swiped the heat sink from a Dimension XPS Gen 2 system.

I just did the same thing, but as I had no other choice, I reused the old
heatsink (with new heatsink compound, of course). I bought another Dim8300
recently to test something I've been wondering about a for long time and
chose to install a 3.2 GHz Northwood P4 as a replacement for the stock,
non-hyperthreaded 2.6 GHz P4.

It works perfectly well, and the CPU does not get too hot.

For those wondering, my first Dim8300 (the one I bought new) has always had
a serious performance problem that felt like a disk bottleneck. I've
replaced just about all the core hardware by way of gradual upgrades
(graphics, CPU, RAM, both hard drives and one of the optical drives) and
still performance did not improve.

This new Dimension 8300 has been configured similarly to my original machine
and handily runs rings around it. So I guess my original unit is somehow
broken.

William