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

The article ...

[Forager]

Here's the original Tom's article.

Here's the text of the new article direct from the source:

Thanks to the millions of people who e-mailed me about this.

Do we title this: We TOLD You So!
or do we title it: Maybe we were right about him?
or do we title it: AMD Won't Burn a hole in your wallet, or your motherboard?
or do we title it: AMD Slaps Around Little Tom-Tom? as Van Smith put it?

Well whatever you want to call it, there is a new video out on the internet showing what REALLY happens to an AthlonXP (or MP) when your heat sink falls off, or when your fans fails. Now I'm not saying that Tom Pabst is completely wrong, but let's just say this makes his testing methods look a little 'suspect' at best. Here's a quote from Van Smith:

A video has appeared on the Internet countering a huge dose of FUD my former employer inexplicably dumped on his readership a couple of months back. The new video, with AMD credits all over it, is entitled "How an Athlon(tm) MP 1.2GHz Really Copes with Heat Emergencies." The piece demonstrates the AMD Palomino Athlon subjected to brutal circumstances such as heat sink removal while playing Quake III and boot up attempts when a CPU cooler is not attached. In all scenarios, the Palomino comes out unscathed. A similar though much less thorough test came out with unsurprisingly different results at Tom's Hardware. Ouch! Looks like dispensing bad medicine can result in a mouthful of looser teeth. Good job Ben & Joe, perhaps you can also give THG a crash course in analyzing computer technology.

The video also presents the much more realistic situation when the CPU fan fails. In that case the Palomino continued to play Quake III for several minutes before shutting down. Again the chip was undamaged.

This video may look like it's from AMD, but I'm pretty sure it's not, even if it makes a great case. The original download site appears to be down, so I mirrored it onto AMDZone right here.

Other mirrors: Mirror.

Update: One of our readers e-mailed me to give me his first hand experience with the thermal control capabilities of the AthlonXP:

I installed my amp1800 (sic) with the heat sink rotated 180 deg. and after 3 hours of trying, incessantly, and not being able to boot I found the problem, I rotated the heat sink and all is fine. I must say, I was sweating bullets when I found the problem.

No fried chip, no smell of burned silicon. Looks like the thermal diode is working.

(end article)

~Aaron.

Re:Toms review

[Strepsil]

Actually, if you read through the article (finally found it), it was a Siemens engineer that claimed the thermal diode was the problem when the CPU fried on one of their boards. AMD was not consulted.

It could well be a case of passing the buck because they didn't want to blame their motherboard which may not have implemented support for the thermal diode properly. That's my conspiracy theory, anyway.

Re:whatever

[GeekDork]

The bad thing is that there are so many ways to screw up. You could get fooled into using one of those neat spacers which might happen to be too thick, resulting in inadequate cooling, thus frying the processor. The Athlon processors can burn before the POST is through, so if your heatsink has fallen off or shifted during transport, you're up for some quick, expensive fun.

Also, you could be one of those freaks using a water cooling system (please shoot me when I start pumping water into my computer!). There's a nice article over at Dans Data about a burnt Intel Celeron(!!) after a cooling failure.

A third problem is the limited use of most monitoring programs or a bad configuration. Motherboard protection can be configured so that all you get out of a failed fan is a nice beeping noise. I tell you something: no one can hear you scream in a dark cellar. I have an old Slot A Athlon 750 running nonstop, and if the fan fails, I'll most probably lose it. The only solution would be to have a monitoring program slow down and/or even shut down the system. Some BIOSs/Mainboards don't support this, so it would be pretty much impossible to prevent an incident directly after switching on, because when the speaker starts beeping it might be too late.

So far, the only solution I've seen to this is an extension to the VapoChill rigs. The system is held in reset state until the cooling system has reached its (sub-zero) working temperature. Only then, the reset bridge is opened and the system is allowed to start up. I have not seen any comparable functionality on a mainboard so far and I don't know whether it would actually help or if the processor produces enough heat even in reset state.

Always looked to me like the heatsink compound...

[Tom7]

When I watched that TH video, it struck me as odd that the intel chip had no heatsink compound and the athlon did. Personally, I think it was that compound burning, not the silicon or housing...

Motherboards can handle the problem

[Twid]

I just got a new Athlon 1800+ CPU with an ABIT KG7-RAID motherboard. It had a thermisistor for the CPU with good default settings, and it has a CPU FAN RPM detector. In the BIOS you can turn on a feature to shut the system down if the CPU fan fails, and you can also set alarms for CPU temp.

So, given that, I'd rather have the better performing and cheaper Athlon system. The risk seems minimal and by the time time you pay slightly more for the Intel CPU, the Intel mobo, and the Intel Rambus RAM, you're paying a lot more. My personal opinion.

- Twid