There is some guy around here who has done a fair amount of playing around with internal diodes and AMD chips...the name escapes me at the moment though

The linearity is pretty good; the omemade diode readers sometimes are not. I put down my comments here:
http://www.procooling.com/articles/h...rmal_dio.shtml
Epox has a motherboard (8K3A) that reportedly reads temps right from the diode. Asus's COP is NOT the same as reporting the diode temps. The Asus boards with COP traditionally added an IC that would poll the diode and shut down the system if temps were over a preset value (75C I think). Perhaps they switched from using this to a completely different IC on their newest mobos; perhaps not. My gut instinct is that people simply went from saying "Asus temp monitoring reports high temps because it sucks" (they historically used a surface mount thermsistor with a 10-11C offset to account for the fact they were extrapolating the CPU core temp from the air temp of the socket) to "Asus temp monitoring reports high temps because it reads from the diode" (but this has not in my eyes been substantiated). I at one point in the days of yore mentioned this about the Asus dually:
http://www.voidyourwarranty.net/revi...cop/index.php3
Anyone with an Asus that "reads temps from diode"? Take out (use tweezers) the surface mount thermistor in the socket and see.