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

You've got the Burning Feeling...

[Whyte Wolf]

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....

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

Tel me abot it

[BillyGoatThree]

"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.

Re:fire?

[baptiste]

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.