The Report of My Thermal Death Have Been...

A reader writes "Not too long ago, Tom's Hardware posted a video of the grisly events that take place when the heatsink is removed on an AMD Athlon MP 1.2GHz in an attempt to show that the chip has inadequate thermal protection unlike the Pentium 4. Apparently, this is not the case. This new video, which looks like was done by AMD, shows the system continuing to work when the heatsink is removed. Even 9 minutes of Quake3 without the fan operating wasn't enough to destroy the processor. So who is right? It's in AMD's best interest to show that their product doesn't disintigrate under extreme conditions. " Update: 10/30 14:11 GMT by H : Note that it was Terry 'quad3d' Wang that actually did the video - not AMDZone.

Comments

Not Convinced, non-standard setup

[Aztech]

But they're using a separate temperature probe and modified bios! The problem is most mobo manufacturers don't include the bios code to shut the system down... or cheap mobo's don't include a thermal diode at all. What they have demonstrated isn't implemented on 99% of the Athlon systems out there, Intel is somewhat better, this isn't going to save Joe Blogg's chip.

The new Athlon XP+ range now includes an internal diode like most Intel chips, by the time external sensors beneath the ZIF reacted it was too late, fried chip. So an internal diode, great you may think, but basically nobody has implemented the code to even query the sensor let alone set up the board to auto-shutdown. Tom used a board that implemented reading the internal sensor, it did just that, but the auto-off functionality wasn't there, again, fried chip. If AMD have to use an older Athlon with an external diode then it pretty much proves the functionality for reading Athlon XP sensors isn't on any board, yet.

Also... this thing crashes, certainly better than a fried chip but remember the P4 automatically scales clockspeed to temperate and doesn't crash, even if it means running at 100mhz (no data loss).

Umm, what part of

[Kasreyn]

Either the systems were NOT the same (hardware-wise)

do you not understand?

If the tests weren't run on the same frickin' hardware then they have no relation to each other, and this entire /. article is a joke.

-Kasreyn