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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.
Fried my Athlon. Doesn't work right anymore. Once a crash-proof macine, now a bomb factory.
What does condensation do to a proc when you... say... don't know how to correctly install a Peltier cooler?
Yeah, the results of the test are quite interesting. Of course, you could buy 2 or 3 Athlons for the price of one P4 and have them
waiting around for when your heatsink/fan fails...
(grin)
gives a new meaning to firewire...
yea. i had a quantum fireball burst into flames before...
lost a mere 20 gigs of data.
--donabal
Safety First Day?
I remember I could tell if the 386 was on or not by how often the Centralized Air conditioning came on. My Celeron 433 runs so cool now I keep it under a blanket for noise protection. Ah....Peltier devices are so cool. (no pun intended). My question is: 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)
JoeLinux
are Marshmallows, Grahm Crackers, and Chocolate. Be sure to invite all the slashcrew to share your s'mores!
<This .sig left intentionally blank>
I can sympathize too. I cracked a corner off my Athlon 1.2 (266) over a hundred bucks ago (back when they were $250). When it didn't boot I decided to see how hot it would get without the heatsink. I turned it off as soon as it started to smoke, but like any idiot I just had to see what temperature silicon starts to smoke at. Luckilly I had a calibrated measurement device, my finger. That T-Bird burned the heck out of me, and you could almost make out the "A" branded into my finger!
I've also just cracked the core on my current 1.33 T-Bird, and I've just picked up a 1.4 at lunch today. Is this some sort of marketing scheme by AMD?!!? I figure they're sticking it to me hard enough with the way their stock is plummeting, every point making my Tahitian retirement much more distant.
Cap'n BryWell 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.
I've got kind of the opposite situtation - a laptop that runs really hot. I'd like to slow down the CPU (300 mhz would be plenty) to allow it to run cooler, which might hopefully also make the battery last longer.
Does anyone know of any utilities? I don't think the BIOS will allow me to set the CPU speed and multiplier. It does support SpeedStep - is there a way to force speedstep on always?
Obviously you could disable this / defeat it easily, but why? I know processors are cheap, but gosh, the 25 mins of downtime to run to the store can't be THAT expensive to rsik melting your machine.
Though it did take my roomate 2 days of tinkering to figure out why his amchine suddenly wouldn't boot anymore... =)
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
You needed an excuse to upgrade, right?
Trapped in Time... Surrounded by Evil... Low on Gas.
I have used a temp. gauge that will automatically shutdown the box. Some BIOS revisions also have a processor fan failsafe.
I had just put together a new box, and was attempting to compile a brand new kernel on it (2.0.36 at the time). About 5 minutes into the compilation, I started getting reams of segfaults and I could not, for the life of me, find out why. Later, I discovered that when putting everything together, I had forgotten to plug in the power cord for my CPU fan. Nasty shiat, that is.
When I bought my first proc that required a heatsink (PIII), the tool at the show sold me the wrong type of heatsink. My fault really, for not being more informed, but the heatsink was for a PII and had this thermal pad on it that was in contact with the core. It took me a little while to figure out that that was in the way of proper heat removal.
Even at 80C I was able to play quake II, etc. without any trouble. Those pentiums can take some serious heat.
"It's comin' back around again..." -RATM
Not a good way of reporting the problem :)
Here lately I've been having a small problem. Our local computer dealer has been getting in new 'cheapie' (ie. standard) heatsink/fan combos for Athlons. These things are huge... a normal sized fan stride a large slotted brick of metal. Well, this is what these new processors require I would imagine, unless of course you want to plop down $50 or so for an Alpha solution.
Well the whole problem I'm talking about is this. The heatsinks hook onto the normal tabs built onto the Socket-A, but due to the weight they can very easily shear off the smaller tab with even a moderately forceful impact.
I wonder if we aren't going to be forced to develop more active cooling for baseline heatsink/fan combos, or just find newer and better ways to mount the increasingly large blocks we have. (Hooking onto the other two tabs on the socket, or attaching directly to the motherboard via the 4 holes around the socket are two methods I've seen)
And what do we do in the post-2ghz world? Have heatpipes coming out of our cases like a Chevy hotrod?
'Life is like a spoonful of Drain-O, it feels good on the way down but leaves you feeling hollow inside'
My GeForce fan stopped working. It destroyed the GeForce card, worked intermittently while I troubleshot things, and then took the motherboard out with it.
Come on now folks. A real test would be to stop the fan, how often does the actual heatsink fall off? Why make a video where someone struggles to remove the heatsink, those things clip down hard for a reason. Fan failure would of been a far more logical test video.
-Eod
This article belongs on News for Newborns, not nerds. Talk about non-usefull completely obvious information. Let me sum up this post in the imortal words of Frankenstein..."Fire Bad".
I want the 2 min of my life back I took to read this garbage! I demand 2 min back!
Screw it. I would have just wasted it downloading porn anyway.
...And i thought putting my cdr's in the microwave for 5 seconds was fun! Where do i sign up for this job??
That's why I have Motherboard monitor running on my computer, along with Shutdown...if my CPU gets too hot (set at 131 degrees F right now), it'll shutdown my computer (my comp doesn't usually get above 110, so 130 is plenty of warning time).
I don't know of there are any equivalents for Linux, but I'm sure they exist.
My plan is to pimp before they realize I'm a jackass. Hit 'em hard and fast.
I woke up one night at 3am thinking my pager had beeped and gone off...when it hadn't I was confused...10 minutes later...I think the same thing..but it's in the living room.
turns out that was a heat warning on my motherboard. The fan for the cpu had gotten wore out and was dying...I killed the box and bought a new fan the next day...but I could have fried my processor if the box hadn't started beeping and woken me up.
----------
ah honey, we're all resplendent - Bill Mallonee
I have it clocked at 450, and at least twice this summer it's overheated. Simply shut it down, let it cool, and fire it back up. Three years running like this hasn't hurt it one bit.
--I think I'm going to drop it next and see how it holds up
This isn't a particularly good time to be putting that phrase in your communications...
Best Slashdot Co
Well, I tend to want my computer to run for along time as a computer... tho I do have an old Celery machine I could turn into a hotplate.. thx for the idea!
Department of Homeland Security: Removing the rights real patriots fought and died for since 2001
I can see a great Rube Goldberg device being made out of this... The bird pecks at the seed, lightening a balance that releases a catch, allowing a blade to swing down and remove the heatsink from an Athalon. The Athalon reaches several hundred degress within a second, lighting a fuse which --you get the picture.
While working as a network admin once, I had a processor burn out without its heatsink. Smoke started rising from the open case, so one of my comrads in arms decided to 'put out the fire' with his bottle of Coke.
I've never seen a machine burn so brightly. We were lucky (or maybe not) that the building's sprinklers were on the blink.
And I live to tell the tale....
Beware the Whyte Wolf.
With a gun barrel between your teeth, you speak only in vowels...
Wow, it just happened to me. Got it's own power-supply wires stuck between the fins (sp?). It was a radial fan.
I ordered a new one from www.quietpc.com. Let's see how that one works. I'm not sure if my CPU got fried or not. Sigh.
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.
The removal of the heat sink proves to be fatal. In less than a second Athlon 1400 dies the heat death. It doesn't take long and the core reaches a temperature of extremely hefty 370 degrees Celsius / 698 degrees Fahrenheit. If the user of the Athlon system doesn't turn off his box immediately, the motherboard will be destroyed too. There's even the risk of a fire.
If this weren't coming from tomshardware.com, I'd be pretty sure that this was some sort of Intel ADVERTisement. I seriously doub that the CPU blows up the second you remove the fan.
"A mind is a terrible thing to taste."
I can comment on this... Once I worked at a school, and I had a recurring problem in my computers: Heathsinks falling off the CPU. This is quite serious - This not only leads to CPU overheating, but a metal heathsink hanging loose inside a PC's case can be VERY dangerous to the system! Fortunately none of my machines fried, but I was expecting it anytime...
This was when the hottest (no pun...) chips were still Pentium MMX 200 or similar... Fortunately now most heathsinks clamp to the socket (and real tight), not just to the sides of the CPU...
I'm certainly reconsidering a purchase of an AMD System now. I was planning on building my next one from scratch.
Now it seems that Intel might get some more of my cash. Just a little too nervous to watch $150 go up in smoke because of a freak accident.
I'd just put together a new machine based on the Gigabyte GA7DXR (great board!). Everything was fine for about 2 hours, and then the Delta just stopped. Now, for those that don't know, this particular fan is LOUD. It has a high pitched whine that's unmistakable. I can hear it down the hall and into the livingroom. I knew immediately when it quit, and hit the power button faster than I'd ever hit it before... and STILL had to wait the 4 seconds for it to finally shut down. ;)
Don't know how hot the processor got, but that heat sink saved it. Turns out the Delta just blew the motherboard CPU fan header - as several sites that I found later said it would. I was VERY happy to find that plugging the Delta into the PS via a 3-4 pin adapter worked, and the machine hums right along to this day.
] D
... I hear they pay good money for pure silicium.
Look a monkey!
What, and let the beer get warm!?
I don't THINK so...
The revolution will NOT be televised.
"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."
One time my stopped working heatsink and the to go first thing was spell/grammar check my.
324006
I've noticed that any stock fan will fail anywhere between 2 and 12 months. I'm listening right now to a socket-370 fan making all sorts of noise. I have about 15 similarly-dead fans lying around, from CPU to power supply to case fans...
The only fan I've had for more than a year that still functions is the Antec PIII dual-fan cooler in my desktop system. Unfortunately I'm too lazy to buy quality fans for the other boxen.
I wish higher quality fans were included in things like power supplies (which are a pain to replace, not to mention dangerous), and especially ones bundled with CPUs. I also don't find many fans actually connected to the motherboard (for monitoring etc); usually they connect inline with a drive power lead...
I once overheated a K6-233 because a drive cable was resting on the CPU fan. Worked for weeks until I was compiling a kernel...
Unfortunately, PCs these days are made as cheaply as possible, with cheap fans, flimsy cases, etc.
NGWave - Fast Sound Editor for Windows
I've been wondering this for a long time. Every so often my motherboard will report that its exceeded the temperature threshold as defined by the software (60 degrees ferenheit or something). When exactly does it become too dangerous?
I remember when Patrick Norton who co-host the "The ScreenSavers" on TechTV forgot to install the heatsink for UGAM 3.0.
Article link below
The Dish: The UGM Incident
"Windows - A thirty-two bit extension and GUI shell to a sixteen bit patch
to an eight bit operating system originally coded for a four bit microprocessor
and sold by a two-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition." (Anonymous USEnet post)
Apple is like a strange drug that you just cant quite get enough of they shouldnt call it Mac. They should call it crack
STOP DOWNLOADING THE FRICKIN VIDEOS FOR GODS SAKE!!
/. effect just sucks.
Christ, the
New AMD motherboards have clock-throttling and an all out shutdown of the computer in the BIOS for when the processor gets too hot. I didn't see where he tested that in this article. Did he even test that or does it not work?
I had an older SMP box (dual MMX-233's). The procs I found shipped with super cheap-o fans. They both went dead in a few weeks after ordering (only the CPU's themselves were covered by the warrenty...). I hadn't noticed at first. I started wondering why KDE (really, the OS in general) was starting to run VERY slow.
I hit every newsboard I could find looking for suggestions. Every suggestion was a flop. One day, I cracked open the case (I forget why exactly) and had a found esentially a microwave oven inside the box. WTF?!? I thought. I quick scan of everything showed me the 2 fans just sitting there jittering (not spinning). DOH!
(No, I don't don't work for these guys)
3d-cool.com has a great selection of cooling things for just about anything. I've since ordered a ton of stuff from them. Fast and reliable, they are. I ordered a couple of the super-duty fans for the older slot-CPUs and the thing ran great! A bit loud but...
The SMP box is now collecting dust (but I know it's 100% ready for mnore when I need it)since I found a Super-Worth box for real damn cheap at an EggHead Auction.
I'm not a prophet or a stone-age man,
I'm just a mortal with potential of a super man.
that should say 6 seconds, not 6 minutes. I believe AMD's spec is that a K7 will die in six seconds without any cooling.
On the two AMD DDR boards that I've played with, there is a new BIOS setting that allows the motherboard to power down the machine after a specific temperature. I have mine set to kill when the motherboard's thermal probe measures over 65c.
This is a great feature, and thankfully I've never had the pleasure of testing it out. Hopefully it responds better than the on-die thermal diode of the Palominos.
--------
It's OK to be social, just don't tell anyone about it.
Well, anyhow, last week I mounted a cheap heatsink to my brand new AMD 1.3G CPU and it burned up before I really got to the post screen. Ish. A few days later my new copper heat sink showed up, but I was more afraid of chipping the CPU than having it burn up... done that too.. They (www.hardocp.com) have long since commented about the few seconds it takes to make an AMD processor keychain by running it without a heatsink, but man... don't even mess with something that may be marginal.
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
I want that Fairlane! :)
It doesn't mean much now, it's built for the future.
I wish my Pentium processor was big enough to cook bacon on, Then I'd never have to use my stove.
Don't write in this space.
OK
It seems to me that one simple solution to preventing a heat sink falling off is to have the motherboard situated parallel with the ground, as opposed to the now popular motherboard-perpindicular-to-ground configuration in most tower cases.
Hence, the load bearing the weight of the heat sink is underneath it, not to its right or left!
Paul
last night actually i see some smoke over by one of my servers... 'oh shit' i quietly think. i go to take the cover off and the aluminum case is too hot to touch. waiting about 10 minutes, i can finally open the thing up and plug it in again and everything seems fine inside, then i notice the power supply fan wasn't working, so i took it apart and soldered on the 2nd case fan. everything still works perfectlly.
aren't there any warnings when power supply fans go out?!! that very well would have burned my house down if i wasn't in the room.
MARIJUANA, SHROOMS, X: ONLINE?! - E
I had the fan fail several times on a 1.2 GHz Athlon, but didn't suffer any damage. Apparently AMD design engieers considere the heatsink, but not the fan, as an integrated part of the CPU.
AMD has just moved us that little bit closer to having a Halt and Catch Fire instruction.
--AC
So the guy's pissed, wondering how he's gonna get the offending non-dividing Pentium out. Then he realizes, hey it's a Pentium. He took off the heat sink, ran his comp for a while. It did it's impression of an Easy-Bake oven and generated enough heat to melt the glue. He then removed it and got his replacement.
Read up on it yourself :) (page 12) (and in case your impatient - its 95 degrees C)
AMD's Thermal Cooling Guide (white paper)
I'm not a specialist in cooling and overclocking and things like that, but the question I have is : if modern processors can't survive themselves "as is" (i.e. without thermal protection), why don't processor manufacturer sell them with an integrated heat sink and a fan bolted on forever, as an integral part of the product ? Even better, the heat sink itself could be bolted through the sides of the processor, and adventurous overclockers could still replace it with whatever piece of heat removal wizardry they want. If nothing else, it would force motherboard manufacturers to invent stronger CPU socket to hold the CPU/heat sink combo.
"A door is what a dog is perpetually on the wrong side of" - Ogden Nash
Response time is also crucial. Palimino had a sensor on it's die, which is the best place to put a senseor w.r.t. response time and it STILL died because it couldn't respond fast enough.
Oof. I bet someone is gettin' flogged for that...
https://www.accountkiller.com/removal-requested
If the thermal diode couldn't meassure temperature deltas over 1 K /s, why don't the logic shutdown the cpu if the temperature rises at this speed ?
There shouldn't be any time in normal operation when this will happen.
Jan
It's only about 3cm by 6 cm by maybe 1.5 cm thick, so it's very unobtrusive, and the readout screen itself is nice and big. Very handy as well, as last week, my CPU fans weren't 100% failing, but were at that age where they need replaced as they are much slower and thus inefficient. I saw the temp go from about 34C to 48C over the course fo the day. I opened it up, replaced the fans, and I'm down below 34C most of the time now.
An ounce of prevention (or in this case a AAA battery of prevention) is worth a CPU in the trash can...
jX [ Make everything as simple as possible, but no simpler. - Einstein ]
I know from experience that if you have a super-heated CPU and a drop of sweat manages to land on it, the CPU will shatter and may explode in a hail of super-heated shrapnel.
Kind thoughts do not change the world
My motherboard's BIOS (Epox D3VA - dual 800 PIII) has a feature where you can set the machine to power down if the temp gets above a certain point. I'm sure most other motherboards have this feature, so why don't people use it? Would prevent a lot of fried silicon...
BTW - Here's a question - what's the temp where a processor gets permanently damaged? I think I have my BIOS sutting down somewhere between 65-70C (my processors usually run 38-40C)
It's clocked up to 495.4 mhz and it never crashes or fail, even when playing OFP for hours.. it's got the original fan that came with it, could problems occur someday?
A horse can't be sick, you know, even if he wants to.
I'd have to say so, since the temp monitor on my asus mobo factory defaults to shutdown at 81 degrees celsius (that's with an athlon 1.0 gHz)
do not read this line twice.
Another lame personal experience story, a friend put a 486dx33 CPU in it's socket the wrong way and about 10 seconds from power up we could smell something burning (the dust on the CPU). We turned the machine off and put the CPU in the right way and it went straight away.
They certainly dont make em like they used to...
Highly configurable, and you can get it to page you when your computer's burning :)
When i first got my 1.4ghz athlon, i didn't have my fan yet, i ordered the mc462 fan, which was highly recomended on tomshardware. anyhow, it wasn't here yet, and i /HAD/ to test it out, well, i turned on the sys, and within 4 seconds heard a loud pop and the smell of buring silicon filled the room. Needless to say, the cpu was destroyed :( Thankfully, the company replaced it for free
I can honestly say that I have never manged to get my G4 processor temp above 48 degrees C, (in a fanless cube).
but a motherboard that detects whether or not a heatsink clamp is down or not, preventing the machine from operating if it's not, sounds like something useful. Although it seems harder for the clamps to come undone in some of the newer designs that are squeezed down pretty well, if it broke off, a motherboard that sensed the loss of tension could power itself down.
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:
x .html
http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/01q3/010917/inde
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...
I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
In my opinion thats way too hot. I believe the white papers for those processors list that as being close to the maximum sustainable temperature. I'd find a better cooler and quick. Even with my 900 o/c to a meazly gig, I rarely get above 140 F (60C) and my case is no shining example of a proper cooling setup... You might also try some heat transfer compound, any decent electronics store will carry it...
-- this space for rent --
At least there's one guy who's banner ads are paying off...
:)
"well computer news aren't really running these days, let's fry a few processors"
Either that or the AMD parts are REALLY cheap.
Oh... they are
--- Metamoderating abusive downgraders since my 300th post.
Amazing... do you see a little devil's face in the smoke of your burned out Athlon though?
"Would it kill you to put down the toilet seat?" -- Maya Angelou
I have an Athlon 1.2 Ghz and Thermaltake Mini Super Orb. It makes A LOT of noise.. Is this normal or should I change it for sommething better?
Thank You.
I've got a dual Pentium III 800 system and even with a fairly stuffy case (lots of SCSI ribbon cables jammed in there) the temperature averages 44C. Yours is approaching double that... seems fairly toasty to me.
Despite what EULAs say, most software is sold, not licensed.
Which makes me wonder why only now are heatsink companies installing dual fans? Yes the Socket A setup means smaller or boxier heatsinks, but still, it seems a no brainer the way small fans die all the time to have a backup. Heck - I have a 4 drive RAID 5 tower on one of my servers and I touch the drive trays constantly to see if they are warm meaning the small fan on the tray is probably dead - now I shell out the $$ for a drive tray with dal fans and a fan monitor circuit to alarm if one dies. I mean given the speed that these suckers died - you have to wonder if you were lucky enough to HAVE a BIOS that would shutdown on a fan failure coudl do it fast enough even if the heatsink was still attached.
I love AMD processors and use Athlons in all my machines - but what was AMD thinking when they left out the thermal diode or an overheat circuit?
Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
It's almost hard to believe that a chip would hit 10x the heat output within a second... My 1.2ghz Tbird runs at around 35-40 celcius on average with a standard heatsink and fan.
To see that those 2 intel chips actually SURVIVED was amazing... And that the P4-2ghz didn't even lock up was impressive. I'm glad to see that Intel DOES care about innovation as opposed to the clock race.
Let's hope that this will drum up some more interesting competition for the chipset field!
"Stop saying 'Don't quote me' because if no one quotes you, you probably haven't said a thing worth saying" -KMFDM
Thankfully on the A-bit KT7 range of boards they have built in heat sensors which sit under the CPU and at other places on the board.
In the BIOS you can set alarms to go off and have the machine shut down when the machine reaches a critical temperature.
Simple but effective. I wonder how many board manufactures are putting this in place?
hey all,
this is interesting. i am running a couple e450s. they have nifty monitors built in that tell me (when i run prtdiag) the temp of each cpu, the fan, the power supply and the ambient temp. I have a script that bitches at me if these get too hot (as an aside, what is "too hot"? i have it set ot warn at 55 and go critical at 60 celsius). anyway, last tuesday the colo's airconditioning went out. ( i was impressed they still had power and network connection w/ the wtc only about 4 blocks away) i watched the machines climb higher and higher all day w/ nobody down there to check the ac and no way to get in to fix stuff. I shut down all redundant systems and hoped. long story short the highest processors went up to about 63 degrees and all is/was still working well.
my questions (in a long winded sort of way) are:
what temp would they die at?
does sun have any internal limiters like the p4?
ej
Anyone else skeptical about how the temperatures on the AMDs rose to ~300 C in "a fraction of a second." That seems a little too melodramatic. I'd think you'd have at least 4 or 5 seconds.
This is related and I don't feel like asking Slashdot or doing a Google search so:
I have a Athlon 800 with a Giga-byte mobo (VIA KT133). As soon as I got the mobo/proc I overclocked it via the bus speed. I set it to 112, (highest speed that would boot), which got me 896 MHz. During the extremely hot summer it started locking up fairly frequently so I knocked it back down to what it was suppose to run at. I just installed a GeForce2 MX200 and 256 MB PC133 RAM and now I can't clock it higher than 104 (834 MHz). It just won't boot higher than that. Anybody have any insight as to whether or not the GeForce or the RAM could be preventing the overclocking or if I've screwed something up from running it hot in the past. I'm too lazy to swap all my components out to try and see what is actually preventing it.
But "no cooling" is not the same as having a fan stop -- as mentioned in the newsblurb -- but having the cooling block itself remain in place. I myself would hope that should my fan die (and it will, and I won't be here -- Murphy), that the CPU will at least survive until I get home to find it hung.
Belief is the currency of delusion.
I am wondering what caused the death of the Athlon, the heat, or the thermal greese bubling and running down onto those smaller chips. (I am not sure if they are cache, diodes, resitrors or what) I fried a TB-1000 when they first came out for putting too much thermal greese on it. So, I wonder what killed it.
until (succeed) try { again(); }
The good folks on a dial up may not want to do the 9 meg d/l. Instead of downloading the Divx try the Real Media files here They should stream, takes a bit to start up. Both 34k and 225k.
Wouldn't it be nice to be able to take that heat and use it somehow. Heat is energy after all..and it seems a shame to be using computers as space heaters.
So out comes the power screwdriver, a couple of quick turns, unplug the old fan, plug in the new one, a couple more turns of the screwdriver, and voila! I have a new fan installed on my still running system with an uptime of two months.
"The reason is quite simple. The high clock frequencies of today's processors, which are nowadays measured in Giga Hertz and not in Mega Hertz anymore, lead to a heat dissipation of 50-80 W. "
I learned a few things from this article, like that heat is measured in Watts, and that the problem is so simple it's a function of clock speed. I used to think the number of transistors required for more advanced designs doubleing every every 18 months was an important factor, but I stand corrected! Boy, a little knowledge truly *is* a dangerous thing.
Guns don't kill people; Physics kills people! - John Lithgow as Dick Solomon on Third Rock From The Sun
Here's a crazy idea: If you don't want to worry about frying your chip DON'T buy a frickin' spaceheater! Jeez, there isn't anything nessesarily hot(>30C) about circuitry. If done right you'd barely be able to tell it's on. Of course, Intel & AMD are more concerened with rediculously high clock speeds than power & heat efficient and durable chips. Flip chips don't help with higher external pinouts, or really effect overall manufacturing much. The sole reason they are used is to disapate the disgusting amount of waste heat generated by the raw(unfinished) core designs.
- RustyTaco
Happily having to turn off screen blanking to tell if his G3/500 laptop is on.
I remember the day I spent trying to figure out why my box would bluescreen and reboot at random times after 1 to 15 minutes after boot. I tried everything including finally reinstalling the whole OS. Still had the same problem. I was about to start switching out memory and had opened the case to get a better look inside when my knuckle wandered into the CPU fan, I pulled back expecting a sharp rap and to my surprise got nothing, Turns out the fan was dead. Now they say a Athlon 1Ghz will fry in a matter of seconds without a fan, but mine managed to live through a whole day of reboots and installs with no damage... If anyone thinks Silver paste and copper heatsinks are nothing but a fad I say I'm sold. But more importantly It shows what weird errors you can get with a dead CPU fan, I never would expect a BSOD. I figure it had to be the CPU giving off bad data or inverted bits because of high heat.
iRepairIT - iPhone, Mac, & PC Repair
They say it can be frelly run with no fun attached. See low heat dissipation thanks to 0.13 and 0.15 micron processes
They're used in laptops most often ... they rely on convection of liquid. There's water or coolant in sealed tubes that radiate heat off at one end and are attached to the proc at the other.
Very elegant yet expensive designs... at least expensive from an OEM standpoint.
When I installed my AMD Athlon 900MHz several months ago my fan fell of for a few seconds. I went to grab my fan and my finger rubbed up against my processor for half a second as I reached to turn off my computer. My finger welted up in seconds leaving a large blister for several weeks. Infact I can STILL see the scar on my left index finger if I look hard enough.
.. but not enough to melt my skin .. OUCH ..
To say the least, I will not be putting my fingers near an atlon processor without a fan on it ever again. I was lucky I didn't fry my processor along with my finger! I figured the thing would be HOT
Last year the cooling fan failed on the CPU of one of my (Linux) servers and it died.
After a bit of work I managed to boot up on another drive to take a look. I found just about every directory under root was now in lost+found and they were all intact.
Result was I got a new machine and then spent about an hour moving all the directories back to their correct places. No data lost at all.
"To stay awake all night adds a day to your life" - Stilgar | eMT.
You know, when I was 15 we played Nixon's farewell speech backwards...it sounded like he was giving orders to people he called "beaver men". Who are these Beaver Men? Henchmen? Politically active porn stars? WHO? The answer: I was just a stupid kid looking to validate my belief that Nixon was a scumbag.
In one of my servers I decided to replace all the fans in the system: CPU and power supply. I went out an bought fans designed for an industrial manufacturing plant where they have to work through dust and oil. The one fan is rated for 9 years of use without failure. Granted, the system is kind of loud now, but the motherboard monitor is reporting that the CPU temperature is 38.8C and the motherboard is 26.6C. I've never seen the CPU temperature go over 42C even when it was hot in the room and the server was getting worked pretty hard.
:)
Those industrial fans are designed to go through hell and back so you might as well put them into a server.
That's why I buy Intel instead of AMD. Heat dissipation and power. If you run your computer 24/7 for 5 years, you will save more money by using a CPU that dissipates 30 watts less (Athlon 1Ghz vs. Intel PIII 1Ghz).
My PIII 866MHz does *not* have a separate CPU fan.
If you're getting 80 degrees C on your T-bird 1.4, something's deficient with your heatsink/fan. Even a lowly Volcano II will do 55. That's under full load, mind you.
If you don't like Katz filter him out in your preferences and quit your whining.
It works, quiet!!!!!!!!!
It cools to around 10C. Only 30 bucks too.
I just had a voltage regulator slid off the PCB on a slot A mainboard after less than 16 months of service. No kidding, the system had a non-overclocked Athlon 700, plenty of extra coolers and definitely no heat problem. The elco's look like they've been leaking, giving of the explanation of why it happened.
Still looking for the kernel patch for a
patch -p1 slid-of-voltage-regulator-2.4.9.diff
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
In the filming of some movie, Altered States, IIRC, there is a scene w/ a live mouse submerged in a liquid. Swimming, breathing, being a mouse. That liquid was Flourinert, and it was real.
s ion.html
Don't get any funny ideas for a prize winning Halloween costume, though. It's in the neighborhood of $400 per gallon. Before quantity discounts, of course. I hear tell that the price of the coolant is the deciding factor in the decommission of Crays all over the land.
Here's a link to (I think) the O/C article... It involved Fluorinert and everybody's favorite, liquid nitrogen.. http://www.octools.com/articles/submersion/submer
meanwhile, an Athlon is catching on fire.
That is one damn good reason to buy Intel over AMD... CPU fans go all the time. If you haven't had one go, then you either frequently monitor/clean your box or you aren't old enough.
Where are all of the "AMD IS MUCH BETTER THAN INTEL" comments that I usually see on Slashdot?
Having a tiny little CPU fan keeping your chip from frying is pathetic design.
Quick! Somebody set up us the Athlon! All your magic smoke are belong to us!
Sorry AMD I loved your K6 processors, they would run with just a heat sink, but I don't want to burn down my house with an Athlon!
Being the resident computer genius in everyone's family, my friend, Kyle tells me to check out his computer. I open the thing up to find about 6 pounds of dust in and around the computer. The processor fan was CAKED in dust to the point where I could no longer turn it manually, even! It's an extreme wonder that the thing didn't die and burn...those pentium 1s sure get hot when there's nothing but a tiny tiny little heatsink on them! Nearly burned myself on that one...
-- Bandit450...If-Else-Do-*TWITCH*!
I had the HSF fall off my duron when moved, the machine died while the scsi bios was doing its thing on boot, before the temperature monitor stuff kicked it. This machine was not overclocekd or anything. I think it is very pathetic of AMD for not including even a simple thing to shut down on an overheat in there CPU's and I intend to take this furthur. I had to shop around to find a HSF that used the extra tabs on the socket A as the middle one on the top of the board lost the end of it when the machine was moved. There are 4 holes around the CPU socket for heatsinks, but no coolers out there will use them.
In order to prevent customers from burning out their CPUs we always set the shutdown temperature in the BIOS to 140 degrees Fahrenheit. Most of the newer boards seem to support this and it should be in the 'Hardware Monitor' section somewhere.
"The meek shall inherit the earth, the rest of us shall go to the stars." Isaac Asimov
"Click here to find lowest price for AthlonMP 1.2 GHz."
I'll take two!
Is that what nerds do all day long? Can't believe we're talking about grief from the loss of heat sinks/fans. WOW!
eTrade SUCKS
I got a kernel dump blue screen in Win2k two weeks ago. I looked down at my computer to find that the fan clip on the processor socket had broken off and the fan was hanging loose. I had just finished putting the bitch together and it had been running like a top for a few hours. One word: baked. I wasn't even getting beep codes. The worst part is that I was running VisualAge for Java at the time and it dumped my repository.
On this subject, does anyone know of any Linux software that will monitor/report CPU temperatures? I've searched before, but with no luck, and I don't feel like disassembling one of the Windows ones...
I wish I had mod priviledges - that was the funniest thing I have seen in weeks
listen up boy,
an athlon at 1gig outperforms a p3 at 1gig by miles. i bet if you would underclock the athlon to perform as slow as the pentium, the athlon would use as much power as the p3, and perhaps even less....
I'm sure a lot of people here have cpu overheat stories. Mine fits with Tom's test quite well, but with a slight twist.
;)
My somewhat weird setup is a P3 in a slocket in an old slot1 BX board. This means that the system cannot monitor the CPU temp and shut it down safely.
One day after some h/w modification (I seem to recall it was moving a tv card from slot to slot) I must have accidentally jammed a power cable in the CPU fan.
After about 10 freezes in a day I wonder if my graphics card is overheating. It is as cool as ever (about 40 deg C), so I just touch the P3 heatsink, and blister my finger. So I spit on a spare finger and *tssst* the spit boils away instantly. I turn the machine off, thinking, "Oh well, I wanted to upgrade anyway".
I cool the poor fevered cpu down with strips of damp tissue paper and find the trapped cable.
An hour later I nervously turn the machine back on and hey presto, the old thing jumps into life as if nothing happened.
I'm currently planning to upgrade to an MP athlon, but I will have to have a checklist for when I muck around with anything
-Yarn - Rio Karma: Excellent
I've seen MANY MANY MANY shipped computers which had the heatsink not on the processor when it arrived at the destination. Having the processor be able to destroy itself when you loose a heatsink is just bad karma...
Not to mention that the processor obviously gets hot enough to catch something on fire if it happened to be in the wrong spot in the case.
Product liability lawsuit anyone? This makes me want to reconsider my AMD is better than intel position.
Ah back in the old days, well, old days, in the days of p90. Fan stopped running, pc crashed. Reattached fan, pc ran again without no problems at all. For years!
www.vanheusden.com - home of Multitail, HTTPing, CoffeeSaint, EntropyBroker, rsstail, bsod, listener, nagcon, nagi
... she had a P3-450. Still does in fact. Anyways, after two years or so, the machine became VERY unstable. I went over to check, couldn't find anything, and hit the BIOS to check the temp.
74C.
... I freaked out. I never saw a non-overclocked machine that hot before... turns out that the manufacturer forgot to plug in the fan's power.
Well, at least now I know how hot a P3-450 can get without frying...
--- Ãther SPOON!
System 360's used printed circuit boards with lots of discrete transistors. They were just starting to phase in newfangled things called "integrated circuits" that could replace literally dozens of transistors.
You either believe in rational thought or you don't
Tom speaks about both a heat-sink falling off and fan failure. For the latter I'd recommend taking steps to see that your heat-sink is up to snuff. Yes, yes, yes...I'm well aware that passive cooling won't work for the overclockers but if your fan kicks out and you're not around it's nice to know that you might be able to survive a CPU meltdown if the heatsink itself is robust. I'm not saying that this is the way you want to run your rig but it might be enough to save it in an emergency.
;)
I've used many types of cooling systems from water-cooling to peltier to a failed experiment in immersing a motherboard in mineral oil (kinda like a Cray) and I've found that a nice old-fashioned big-ass heatsink will get you by. Peltiers are dangerous because if they lose power they actually start acting like and insulator and speed up the destruction. Water cooling works great for cooling but I'm still nervous leaving the machine on when I'm not around, I get the same feeling when I leave my place with the dishwasher on. Most heat sinks that come with off-the-rack systems are useless, I buy heatsinks as birthday presents for people I know that have bought Dells. If the heat sink falls off there's not much you can do unless you've got a successful mineral-oil-immersed motherboard
Here's some good info sites:
www.ocaddiction.com
www.coolerguys.com
www.overclockershideout.com
www.frozencpu.com
www.extremecooling.org
Motherboard Monitor a nice utility.
you could run a P4 without a fan, although it's probably not recommended, voids all warranties, etc. etc., and slows the thing down considerably. It'd be interesting to see how much power it needs and some performance data on this, maybe compared to notebook processors. Instead of going for MHz-Rates nobody needs and which give only very small Performance-Benefits anyway, maybe the industry should consider to think more about processors needing less power and hence less cooling.
Think not only laptops, but also desktops in a work-environment, where small, silent, easy handling and even powerconsumption is much more of a concern, than computing power. Embedded devices, where a noisy and large heatsink+fan is not an option, or even computing power per m^3 when heatdissipation starts becoming a limiting factor.
"By the way if anyone here is in advertising or marketing... kill yourself." -- Bill Hicks
We booted up those systems normally, started Quake III Arena, running the NV15-demo, and then removed the heat sink.
Cool, I do this all the time!!
So obviously Athlons and Durons are not reliable without a reliable heat-sink/fan solution. However, the price/performance of the AMD chips cannot be beat. This is a dilemma for computer "consultants". Suppose, for instance, that you have a customer--a small business--that needs a new server (firewall/file/web/email). You choose an AMD Duron plus a large case with extra air-flow fans, air filters and a big "expensive" heat-sink/fan.
I've used several Athlons and Durons for a few years now and never had a heat-sink/fan fall off but I've had one fan fail (about 1 in 10). There are several issues that make building the system and insuring its reliability harder than with P4 systems:
All of these issues contribute to increased liklihood of system failure. While it is true that P3 systems have about the same but slightly less likelihood of failure due to similiar mechanical problems, the P4 solution really is much better than the others in that the heat sink is mechanically attached to the motherboard/chassis rather than only the socket.
I have noticed that many Athlon/Duron motherboards have holes around the CPU socket, presumably for a heat-sink/fan mechanism that will attach thru the holes to the chassis or at least around the motherboard but I have yet to see a cooling solution for these boards that makes use of those holes. Of course this does not address the fact that many Athlon (especially the cheaper) motherboards have capicitors nearby the socket that physically block the installation of many of the larger cooling devices. So one is left with the following questions:
That said, I continue to use, recommend and sell AMD-based systems but I would sleep better at night if I knew that the system was not liable to die when (not if) the fan fails.
While pondering of all this a thought comes to mind: The newest hardware is just not as mechanically reliable as the systems of olde (Remember how physically solid the IBM PS/2 systems were? Even the older Macintoshes could take a lot more physical abuse than today's stuff). Is it possible to build something using what is available today ("off the shelf") that approaches being as mechanically solid as what used to come out of IBM, Sun and DEC?
Puts new meaning to the phrase, "Don't lose your cool, man!"
Once while working in a computer store, couple years back, a young lady came in to buy everything she needed to go with her brand-spanking-new K6-2 400, which she'd bought on eBay. She took the equipment home, and then returned the next day with it, asking me to diagnose why it wouldn't work.
After a mindnumbing afternoon, I began to notice a strange smell, like burning tires, coming from the computer. Turned it off, looked inside, nothing. So I left it running now, and peeked in, And saw a bright-blue, 4 inch flame leaping from some poor unnamed IC on the mobo. Replaced the poor wretched mobo, and got the same results on another $120 board
The moral - somethings are sold on eBay because no sane person would otherwise buy them.
Lucky my boss was so understanding...
Interesting that the post didn't clearly state the thrust of Tom's conclusions -that AMD processors, Athlon and Palamino are dangerously under-designed thermally and Intel's are very well designed thermally. You can be sure that if case was reversed and Intel CPUs died 1 sec after the fan came off, the company would be prominently mentioned. Couldn't be that Slashdot Culture likes AMD, could it?
Just for the record, (I love this part...):
We recommend that every owner of an Athlon or Duron processor should check the seat of its processor heat sink and the proper operation of the heat sink fan on an at least monthly basis. Otherwise you are indeed facing a processor and a motherboard that goes up in smoke.
Have you opened up your Athlon PC this month?