The Joys Of Losing Your Cooling Device

nitecreep wrote to us about Tom's latest article: What happens to procs when the heatsinks fall off?. Having just had my brand new fan stop working on my computer, I can sympathize. I've found that it takes my 1.2 Ghz Athlon to reach 80 degrees Celsius in about 6 minutes, from time of starting machine. The results of running without a heatsink at all are....interesting.

Comments

Heat sinks on video cards

[iplayfast]

are also interesting. Any games which used 3d graphics would freeze totaly after some random period of time. this went on for months. Finally a tech guy suggested I check the heat sinks, there might be a gap between the heat sink an the card or cpu.

Well there was a gap alright. The heat sink had fallen off and was lying on the card beneath it.

After applying heat transfer goop and bolting it back on, things have been running well.

Re:He he he

[Chris Mattern]

> When are they going to come up with a heat
> sinking device that runs like the engine block
> on a car (I.E. the water/freon/liquid
> nitrogen/liquid helium/butane actually flows in
> channels built for it within a heatsink block)

Talk to yer granddad or someone your granddad's
age if your granddad didn't work with computers
about the IBM 360, or just about any other main-
frame of that era. From the 50's to the 80's
just about *all* the big iron was cooled in just
that manner. Mostly water--I can still remmeber
having to monitor the chilled water flow through
an IBM 3033--although I believe that the Crays
used some funky proprietary coolant (it was
pink!).

Chris Mattern

Play it safe

[fobbman]

There are freeware programs available for Windows (probably Linux as well) that monitor the temperatures reported by your motherboard. Some like Motherboard Monitor will actually shut down your computer if one of your sensors report a temperature greater than a threshhold that you can set.

I'd link to them, but I believe that linking from Slashdot to websites hosting small free projects like this is cruel and inhumane. Go do a search and download it from one of the mirrors.

Re:Play it safe

[pointym5]

Problem is they can't respond quickly enough to prevent CPU burnout. The probes are polled at most once per second, and the probe itself doesn't detect the temperature rise very fast.

The Athlons apparently take only a small number of seconds to burn out, so a software solution is inadequate - indeed, that's the point of the article. The PIII and PIV have internal coolant failure handling.

URL wrong? /.ed?

[merlin_jim]

I couldn't follow the link, so I navigated the site a little... Not sure if tomshardware is slashdotted or if the link was wrong... in any case here's the mirror I got to, page came up immediately:

http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q3/010917/index .html

I tried the same link both in the www6 and in the root subdomain, and both gave me a 404... try this link if thats still the case...