Re: [RFC/SERIOUS] grilling troubled CPUs for fun and profit?

From: Claudio Martins
Date: Mon Jun 19 2006 - 17:15:07 EST



On Monday 19 June 2006 21:00, linux-os (Dick Johnson) wrote:
> You accelerate nothing. Bit heaven? A CPU without a fan will go into
> a cold, cold, shutdown, requiring a hardware reset to get it out of
> that latched, no internal clock running, mode. Try it. I have had
> broken plastic heat-sink hold-downs let the entire heat-sink fall off
> the CPU. The machine just stops. I didn't know why it was stopping

That may well be true for Intel Pentium 4 and AMD Ahtlon64/Opteron CPUs but
it is definitely *not* what happens on older AMD CPUs. Actually we have had a
case of smoke coming out of a box when the heatsink fan on an Ahtlon XP CPU
stopped. You could still smell the burnt plastic from the socket the next day
in the room ;-)
And I personally know of a least another case with an Athlon XP.

I think Intel used to be better than AMD concerning CPU casing and the size
of the area in thermal contact with the heatsink, but not anymore.
Opteron/Athlon64 case seems to be at least as good as Intel's, and the chips
should now have thermal throttling, though I haven't tried it!

Regards

Cláudio

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