September 20, 2001

11:14 AM

Ever wonder what would happen to your CPU if you took the heat sink off?The downloadable video of the tests speak louder than html.
posted by linux (9 comments total)

and the moral of this story: don't run your computer with your heatsink off your CPU.
posted by howa2396 at 11:32 AM on September 20, 2001

what a great video. I remember when the g3 first came out and there was this joke about how big the heatsink is on intel machines. Have you seen the size of the heatsink on the lastest gen macs?
posted by tomplus2 at 12:01 PM on September 20, 2001

Have you seen the size of the heatsink on the lastest gen macs?

When the first gen imacs came out, Apple was bragging it up big time about how quiet their fans were. Then all the processors started melting down. The second generation machines were a lot louder.
posted by jpoulos at 2:05 PM on September 20, 2001

The best one is the Athlon heatsink - one of my friends had it fall of on his computer, apparently its only held in by a couple of clips?

I remember some overclocking type had his computer down at -5C to ensure his computer didn't melt... Hmm, combined PC/Fridge? Idea...
posted by Mossy at 2:58 PM on September 20, 2001

I never used to worry much about my computer running 24/7. But oh lovely if the fan stopped working while i wasn't home.
posted by jessie at 3:22 PM on September 20, 2001

More intel shilling from tomshardware. I can't think of a more unfair test. The P4 is designed to use speed step technology to not only control temperature but to keep power levels low for laptops. The P4 is both a laptop and desktop processor and benefits from its design. The athlon on the other hand is a desktop creature that has been shoehorned into laptops.

All I'm seeing is "look at how intel has speedstep and amd doesn't." I'm also curious to know how much of a "bad move" this is for AMD. How often do heatsinks just come off? Compared to fan failure it has to be astronomical.

Its nice to see stuff burn, but I don't think this test is a serious reason to buy one chip instead of another.
posted by skallas at 8:46 PM on September 20, 2001

The Athlon Palomino chip was designed for laptops and will soon be used for the new Athlon line. It burned.

And most desktops have CPUs mounted sideways with a big fan/heatsink set up hanging onto a few measly clips.

I think the test was rather fair.

My computer suffered fan failure and the machine simply shut down. I feared the chip had burned, but with a new fan in place it was up and running, happy as ever.

No doubt AMD has a more efficient clock cycle, but the Intel at least takes care of its CPU with speedstep. And if you're the type that likes to shove a bunch of extra fans in the housing, and say, use a horizontal box.
posted by linux at 11:11 AM on September 21, 2001

Finishing my run on sentence -- then AMD is cheaper and probably a good choice. So long as you know what you're getting into.
posted by linux at 11:31 AM on September 21, 2001

It was a fragment, not a run-on :-)
posted by jpoulos at 5:05 PM on September 21, 2001