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The Joys Of Losing Your Cooling Device

Posted by Hemos on from the burn-baby-burn dept.

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.

11 of 388 comments (clear)

  1. He he he by JoeLinux · · Score: 3, Funny

    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

    1. Re:He he he by Chris+Mattern · · Score: 4, Informative

      > 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

  2. Doesn't everyone smoke at least 1 TBird? by mmmbeer · · Score: 3, Funny

    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 Bry
  3. alarm by CrazyBrett · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Not a good way of reporting the problem :)

  4. You've got the Burning Feeling... by Whyte+Wolf · · Score: 4, Funny

    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...

  5. Tel me abot it by BillyGoatThree · · Score: 4, Funny

    "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
  6. How to burn Athlon on TechTV by lowdozage · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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
  7. Too much heat can be GOOD, sometimes by cant_get_a_good_nick · · Score: 3, Funny
    I remember a story when the first Pentiums came out, and they had the FPU bug. A guy wanted to swap his chip out, but couldn't. They had glued the processor in. Turns out his comp maker had found out that Zero Insertion Force also meant Zero Removal Force and people were swiping the chips fairly often.


    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.

  8. URL wrong? /.ed? by merlin_jim · · Score: 3, Informative

    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...

    --
    I am disrespectful to dirt! Can you see that I am serious?!
  9. Re:fire? by baptiste · · Score: 4, Interesting
    i had a quantum fireball burst into flames before

    Back before we had a real fileserver at my old job, we had a home built box - Dual Pent II 300 with Tyan mobo hooked to a tower of 8 of the original 9GB Seagate Cheetahs - talk about HEAT! That tower pumped out so much heat we didn't worry about hte HVAC in the winter!

    Well, one day we start getting hammered with calls from folks - file server is down. We walk into the server room and the first words out of my mouth: "What's burning?"

    TUrns out it was the server. We powered it down, pulled it apart - the power supply cable had overheated and burned (yes BURNED) from the mobo socket about 6" up the wire. OooooK. Talk about a head scratcher - we had NO idea WHY the system had failed, er, burned. SO we start poking around (literally) and notice - one of the heatsinks had come off one of the CPUs ever so slightly, had overheated, and had drawn excessive current (though why teh PS didn't pop a fuse, shut down, etc is still a mystery) WE reattached the heatsink, replaced the power supply - system came right back up. Unreal. I know for a fact that the CPUs are still running systems today - amazing.

    --
    Top Most Bizarre/Disturbing Error Messages
  10. AMD Athlon 900MHz by ryanw · · Score: 3, Interesting

    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.

    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 .. but not enough to melt my skin .. OUCH ..