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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.
Tom's Hardware is generally known for the accurate reporting and trying to keep the playing field level in tests.
This one should be pretty easy to test...Someone just needs to have the resources to risk frying a few dozen processors.
I was a little surprised when I read the results on Tom's Hardware...I would have expected they could see this could be a major issue for AMD and would have run even more tests to make sure their results were accurate and not a bad batch or something like that.
Hate to see Tom's take a credibility hit on this one, so it will be interesting to see how this one unfolds!
The video on Tom's Hardware Guide can be found here.
I'm looking for a HEPA media filter for my TV. I'm alergic to reality shows.
Why don't the chips come with built in heatsinks? The heatsink could be fused right to the core to provide the best possible connection. It would kick up costs, but you never need to worry about heatsink failure. My nightmares would finally stop.
Later,
Affe
I had the heatsink sorta fail. We think that the fan stalled, and that led the processor to heat up. It ended up killing my motherboard, but oddly not my precessor. I bought a new motherboard, and got a big heatsink along with some extra case fans, and now the system works fine.
I'm impressed that that heat could fry the mobo but NOT The processor, it's sort of weird actually. But there are a whole lot of things on most motherboards right next to the processor, and on mine they all looked slightly burned.
...but this new video shows the same results as the TH video! After about 2 seconds with the heatsink off, ths system SHUTS DOWN.
Only when the heatsink is left on, but the fan power is disconnected, does it last 9 minutes.
The thing doesn't last 9 minutes with the heatsink off, crikies....
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.
student of animation and the fine arts
I can attest to an Athlon 1.4 GHz @266FSB not burning when booted with an improperly fitted heat sink. It failed at / didn't make it to POST. However, fitting a heatsink properly, the machine worked fine. Tests in bios, when I made it, showed the system getting up to 75oC before locking (hard!). Much research into this, prior to refitting my heatsink (using acetone to take off heatsink thermal pasted and replacing it with a good silver compound), showed that Athlon 1.4's do get up to 60oC at operating temperature. Mine operates around 50oC, with an ambient temperature of around 27oC. Indeed, these machines heat the room they are in.
To simply trust someone as being "independent" merely because they don't seem to be affiliated with one vendor or another would be naive, IMO. Tom has already been suspect after the fiasco involving NVidia 3D accelerators.
Nobody has NO agenda. Tom needs people to go to his site to stay afloat and I for one wouldn't put it past him to fake someting like this in order to drum up interest (al la Dateline's rigging of their "independent" testing of the dangerous side-saddle gas tanks)
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
Well, it does show the need to do a more careful retest; Toms CPU:s could be from a faulty batch, there could be motherboard-related differences, there could be lots of reasons for the discrepancies.
The best independent data should always be taken with a grain of salt, not because you wouldn't trust the source, but because only one datapoint is not enough for verification.
/Janne
Trust the Computer. The Computer is your friend.
I mean, isn't that what you want a system that's malfunctioning to do, shut down? If it didn't shut down, then it would continue to heat up and roast your cat which was using your tower as a space heater.
Maybe I'm missing the point...
F-bacher
James Tiberius Kirk: "Spock, the women on your planet are logical. No other planet in the galaxy can make that claim."
If you read the toms hardware review, it said the athlon MP/XP thermal diode were capable of detecting no more then a 1 degree/celcius per second change and no more ... they've carefully engineered this "test" so the rate of change is below that threshold... toms test was worst-case and thats what you have to plan for.
Free Techno/Jazz/DNB/MI Music by guys obsessed with monkeys!
All this shows is a motherboard with sufficent onboard temperature monitoring, shutting down because the CPU is over heating. It has nothing to do with the CPU having any sort of built in temperature throttle like the P4 has (or even the 68040 had). Tom's Hardware and this video are showing two completely different and seperate things. One shows how a motherboard reacts in order to save an amd cpu (this current video), and the other shows what happens if the cpu is left to cope with a heat problem on its own (Tom's tests) without the motherboard stepping in to rescue it.
/. just doesn't care some days... or maybe its just on slow days ;).
I wish people would at least FILTER some of these posts. Its seems that
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.
Fight hunger. Filet a politician and send him to a 3rd world country of your choice.
Besides, alot can be forgiven of the company that gave me a real math co-processor and "fast" math toys on Hercules graphics for my 4/8 mhz(turbo!) 286.
It's windows media video. On linux, play it with mplayer.
I watched this video and found it quite interesting. One difference between this video and tom's video was the motherboard and chipset that was used, that could have something to do with the different outcomes. Tom used some motherboard I've never even seen before, I had to hunt the net to find info about it. The new amd video uses a motherboard with the amd 760 chipset.
My other issues against tom are the benchmarks that he uses now, compared to what he used to do. Last review I just remember seeing the bapco and quake3 tests. Which is interesting because of all the rumors that bapco and intel are the same company. Read here. Then the quake3 benchmarks... umm, wasn't that what the P4 was optimized for? I remember back when the K7's first came out and tom threw a barrage of tests at it... a good FPU one was the 3DStudio one (which I didn't see in the last test).
Lastly, I remember the massive intel ad banners on the site when Tom did the 2Ghz P4 review...
So in my eyes, Tom sold out and I don't trust his reviews anymore.
Question everything that you've accepted without thinking.
I'm thinking of buying an Athlon XP (when the Asus A7V266-E with the new fast VIA chipset becomes available). I'm not that afraid of loosing the CPU or even the board. The chance that my heatsink falls of it not very high. On the other hand, I am afraid of fire hazards in my house. And I'm not sure whether the chance of an Athlon setting fire to my house is zero. If it's not, it's not really an option for me to buy one and I'll probably go the P4 route.
I wish I had some certainty about the actual danger of these chips. Again: I don't mind the very small risk of loosing a CPU/board . I do mind any risk of a fire.
Who's to blame for not being able to play QuickTime Movies in Linux?
Your answer: Apple
Correct Answer: Soreson.
Correct Answer #2: Those who encode using Sorenson rather than a more free QT codec.
I work for a local computer shop, and although we are no Dell or Gateway, we've seen a lot of weird hardware stuff over the years.
And the fact of the matter is that AMD CPUs can really burn up just like in Tom's Video.
We've seen more than once, a customer coming back with what he said was a defective AMD CPU, and when we check the CPU, we could see the adhesive barcode that we put on the underside of each, partially burned out !
And don't get me started on the damn fragility of those AMD CPU, we've got dozens of them broken because some guy slipped when installing a fan on them.
Murphy
In high school, I used to check Tom's Hardware Guide regularly. His posting on over clocking seemed fascinating. He seemed to have a good understanding of hardware issues.
Then I went to college, still a reader.
Taking a few courses on hardware however, made reading his reviews painful.
He doesn't understand hardware, and it shows. Sure, he is able to run tests, but his reasons are completely flawed.
I don't accuse Tom of being on the take... However, I think that Tom should stick to testing, and not give his "engineering" insights that are based upon made up terminology and without an engineering basis.
This is a more reasonable review, and the first one that I viewed of his in years.
Alex
I'm so glad that I'm not the only person who worries about this. the little server I leave running 24/7 is using a 466 celeron clocked down to 333 (on a slotket.) this is specifically so the tiny box will run with minimal noise and heat, so I won't have to worry about some sort of massively hot system short circuiting and roasting my living room.
:)
I love big computing equipment, but not when it's sitting in my house making noise and sucking power
EOM
I object to this type of video trash. They provide an unrealistic, degrading portrayals of CPUs that take off their heat sinks/cooling units for no apparent reason! Like that sort of things happen all the time in real life.
I don't care who is making them, it must be stopped. Will someone think of the children!
Codeala - Just another mindless drone
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).
I killed a Tbird by running it without a heatsink for a whole 4 seconds. It got very hot, VERY fast. I know several other people that have done similar things. 9 minutes? I think not.
I spoke with a guy who did beowulf clusters as
1q2w3e4r5t6y7u8i9o0pqawsedrftgthyjukilo;p'azsxdcf
Frankly, I'll believe Tom's first. He at least can claim to be an independant agent (though I'm sure I'm about to get 50 replies telling me about his secret AMD funding), so I think he might be a bit more impartial than the "AMDzone".
I can hardly imagine how there could be this large a difference. Either the systems were NOT the same (hardware-wise), or the burn-out chip was poor quality, or AMDzone is lying, or Tom's is mistaken/lying, or this has been misreported.
I see no way in which you could "mistake" as to whether or not a processor burst into flames upon cooler removal. That sort of thing is pretty much an either-or that anyone with eyes can determine.
-Kasreyn
Kasreyn: Cheerfully playing the part of Devil's Advocate to hairtrigger
I propose a new test: strap the mobo+Athlon to a wall.
.45 into the heart of the processor. Run performance test.
Scientifically fire a
Tests may show that the Athlon does not hold up under impact of a projectile. A video of this process may be necessary to prove the point to the skeptical.
Naysayers and Athlon proponents may argue that this test does not reflect real-world operating conditions, but who cares -- it's a great video.
OK -- AMD has my vote for no other reason than using my current "heads-down" development soundtrack: the Matrix.
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
If you look at both videos, the thing to notice is that Tom's tests were done using VIA chipsets, whereas AMD's tests were done with AMD chipsets. There is NO discrepency here. VIA's chipset is to blame because it doesn't shut down the system!
Go back and watch again. I think this makes far more sense. AMD would not publish a video that was outright forged, they would be silent on the matter. Tom would not gain anything by publishing misleading data.
THE PROBLEM IS THE DIFFERENT CHIPSETS USED.
XeoMage
I've never seen a fan that weighed more than a couple of ounces at the most
I have a large desktop fan pointed into my system right now (don't laugh, it reduces the CPU temperature by 15-20 degrees). I would guess its weight at 3-5 pounds.
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
I had a window fan pointed at my open tower case during the summer. It definitely reduced cpu temps by at least 20 degrees....but I had to go re-comb my hair every time I used my PC.
It's very easy to proof that a processor can't work for so long. Just put it under midday sun in Rio de Janeiro(+100F), and you see your CPU goes to the CPU's heaven.
But we can also put it to work in alaska and we don't even need the coller :o)
Whatever, these tests are just like the others. Tom's test was prepared to see when the processor crashes, and the AMD test's was made so the processor survives for a long time. It's a matter of statistics.
A joke now:
The mathematics made his calculations and said tha 2.351 liters of water was enough to solve the problem
The physics drawed some schemes in the paper and said that 2.500 liters was enough to solve the problem
The engeneer loked up, stayed quiet some secondes and said that 4.000 liters would solve the problem The statistic saw the problem and aske the fireman, "How much water do you want to spend?"
And that's what have happened in both tests.
-=-=-=-=
I know life isn't fair, but why can't it ever be un-fair in MY favor!?
Now I would certainly like to see a ~20W Athlon (which I have heard about, can't say where) some day, but even if they don't get that low and if they do burn up with no thermal solution, I don't care...
If you run it without any thermal protection you should know better... Even a P100 needs some kind of cooling (albeit not as much as anything now-a-days), so if you're running without, tough luck... If you thermal solution fails, you better have made sure in advance that the chip was under warranty for such things or that your thermal solution provider had a warranty in case their product failed or perhaps never works in the 1st place. I hope the Tyan Tiger + AthlonXP 1800+ MPs come down in price and then I plan to buy them and have a nice SMP system, and I could care less if it runs kind of hot, as long as it does what it's supposed to do and as long as the heatsink/fan/whatever I have does what it's supposed to do.
Now if when we eventually have fiber optic processors &/or quantum computers in people's homes and they burn themselves up, yeah then that'd bug me, but face it metal conducts, it's gonna heat up, plain and simple.
And if you totally disagree with me, that's kewl, I don't mind, you're free to care about such things if you want, I just felt like saying it doesn't seem to be that critical of an issue to me.
I recently (two months ago) bought myself a Athlon 1.4 Ghz CPU and because the fan that was supplied with it was so noisly, I switched it for another fan. However, I was careless and didn't mount the heatsink/fan properly onto the CPU (basically they weren't touching).
Let me assure you that the Athlon 1.4 Ghz is more than capable of destroying itself within 5 seconds if it doesn't have adequate cooling.
I am now Aus$400 poorer and a little more careful.
The Intel chip is still better, because the mobo didn't matter. The chip underclocked itself, or shut itself down, without any additional assistance. This is superior to any sort of motherboard dependency.
Show us a free quicktime codec that is better than Sorenson and i'm sure people will start to use it. Your accusation that the "problem" is because its not free, is an invalid excuse. It was used because the output video is better (best video for a given file size, given play time, and given resolution) than any other codec, not because it cost money or wasn't free.
Funny, Maxim's first app note for the MAX6512 is Simple Circuit Activates Fan When Processor Heats Up.
So it is apparently a mobo feature that uses a thermal diode integrated into the processor. Is the thermal circuit in the Pentium totally self-contained?
+5:offtopic,but anti-American
That statement is misleading. It uses WineLib to read the dll, you do not need to have wine installed for it to work.
"We obviously need a new moderation category: (-1, Woo-fucking-hoo)" --Mr. AC
From an earlier HardOCP article...
"One thing that has been worth looking forward to is the addition of a thermal diode inside the core of the AXP CPU.This will for allow you to read the core temperature when the right hardware and software are present. You might have seen a famous hardware site make the statement on a video recently that even while their Palomino has a thermal diode in place, it burned up anyway when they removed the heatsink. Well, this was no fault of the AMD CPU, just the fault of the misinformed operator. You must have a board that has the ability to utilize the diode and also have the proper BIOS to facilitate a system shutdown in a high core temperature situation. Of course, making it work cooler now allows us to speed it up and make it work hotter later!"
Tom's is usually pretty accurate but he too has had some knocks on his credibility from time to time. I think the best thing we can take from this whole incident is never take any site's opinion as gospel. Always read several site reviews before making a decision about a product.
G. Washington on Government "it is force. Like fire, it is a dangerous servant and a fearful master."
Who's to blame for not being able to play QuickTime Movies in Linux?
Apple's answer: Sorenson
Sorenson's answer: Apple
Sorenson would be happy to make a Linux codec, but they done sold an exclusive license to Apple. So. Talk to Apple.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
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...
Perhaps you should read the referenced articles before posting?
1. Many people find they need a rather big (and heavy) heatsink to keep an Athlon cool enough. These heavy heatsinks can fall off.
2. The CPU thermal sensor used on Athlons cannot respond to temperature changes faster than about 1C/second. Tom's tests showed the CPU melting in just a few seconds, so your monitoring software would do nothing to help you in that case.
do you not understand?
If the chip hits 370 degrees in a few seconds, and the thermal diode in the CPU itself can only handle 1C/sec then it doesn't matter what mobo you use.
However the fact that the chips were completely different, and the second video appears to be done by AMD means that the comparison is moot. However, if this test is indeed true, then it just means that AMD fixed the problem in their latest chips, not invalidated Tom's tests.
If God gave us curiosity
One thing is removing the heatshink while the CPU is running. If this happens accidentally (ex., the clip breaks and the heatsink falls off), it'll probably hit graphics card, short-circuiting it. So even if the CPU survives, your system still crashes. But the chances of this happenning are very, very slim.
A different thing (rather more likey) is the fan stopping while the heatsink remains on the CPU. This has happened to me once, with an Athlon @ 1GHz, when a cable got stuck in the fan (whoever designed those Titan Majesty coolers didn't remember there are cables inside the case). After about 1 minute the motherboard started beeping and the system froze (I don't know if it this was a safety measure taken by the board - an Asus A7Pro - or a consequence of some error). I turned the power off, pulled the cable from the fan, let it cool for a couple of minutes and turned it back on. It still beeped for a while (it was at about 90 C) but booted normally, and it's been working fine since.
Anyway, an appropriate heatsink is a requirement of the CPU, just like a proper electrical supply. If you feed a CPU 220 volts instead of 1.7, it probably won't last long either...
After 9 minutes, the video camera stopped working because the room all of this took place in was cooled to -50 degrees C...
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
- "When you want something with all your heart, the entire universe conspires to give it to you" -Paulo Coelho
But Tom was testing on a system that DID NOT SUPPORT PowerNow. Yes. It had support for reading the thermal diode. But, IIRC, simple support for reading the diode doesn't equate to PowerNow support.
So yeah. If you run on an older system without PowerNow, it's the same as running an Athlon without a thermistor.
On a setup that actually supports the thermistor, the system will shut down in time.
Chas - The one, the only.
THANK GOD!!!
That's all.
If the mainboard is compatible & is able to read the intenal thermister inside the AMD CPU then the CPU will just throttle back more 'n more as it gets hotter & hotter, eventually when it hits the maximum barable temp it will shutdown..
If the motherboard is not compatible, then either your computer will shutdown straight away or your CPU will fizzle (depending how your bios is setup & how your CPU fansink's fan is wired - if your fansink's fan is plugged into the motherboard's CPU fansink header connector & your bios is set to 'auto-shutdown on CPU fan failure' or something like that, then your computer will just shutdown straight away when it detects the failed fan, if not your CPU will fizzle)
Probably one of the worst mistakes I have made in the past few months...
You actually thought that a k6 heatsink and fan would be enough for a 1.4G Athlon? Without thermal gel?? AND you make mistakes like these every couple of months??
Dude, go buy your machines from Dell or Compaq or somebody else before you burn down your house. You should also seriously consider having a trusted friend hide all the sharp objects in your house from you.
The line must be drawn here. This far. No further.
If this is a feature that needs MB support, it should be explitly advertised as such and then we may see fully XP supporting boards.
See my journal, I write things there
The SCO box had been going kind of erratic, killing the odd user process. This was bad because their entire business (four vet clinics, maybe 20-25 workstations) was running from it.
I couldn't touch the case bare-handed to get it out, it was too hot. I used some convenient price lists as insulators to get the (still running) box out far enough to circulate air around it, at which point I aimed a fan-heater (set at blow-only-no-heat). After a few minutes, it was cool enough to touch, albeit briefly, so I unbolted the lid and angled the blower at the PSU. This kept it happy (ie no more dead processes) until after closing time about nine hours later, when the clinic's director replaced the PSU.
The box kept running flawlessly for some months until they replaced the P-II-350 SCO box using 32M of RAM and about 800M of its 2GB hard disk for Telnet clients with a monster multi-CPU gigabytes-of-RAM acres-of-disk Terminal Server box supporting similarly high-grunt Win2k client boxen, each doing nothing more than an X server would be.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Mind you, the no-heatsink test does smack of running a half-track into a passenger sedan.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
You're forgetting one very important detail. The CPU presented in that little video clip is the Athlon MP, the new Palomino core that supports SMP. I wouldn't be surprised at all to find that AMD made their new MP processors resistant to heatsink/fan failure, following on the heels of Intel's P4.
The processor that Tom Pabst had fried is an older model, using the T-Bird core. It is only fair to assume that the old Athlons didn't have this overheat protection built in (which becomes obvious for all of us who have fallen victim to those stupid rubber spacers on early heatsinks).
-Billco, Fnarg.com
My cat knocked over my PC with a AMD1.2 MP with thermal protection software and sensors that worked and within 5 seconds, there was a horrible smell and a fried CPU. My Pentium 733s fan failed and it ran for 2 hours until the computer shut down. I like AMD but for the love of God, Don't let your cpu's fry so fast!
Welcome to the Entropy Bar, may I take your order?
And it isn't like the MB manufacturer would have any reason to blame AMD instead of itself. After all, every company in the industry takes responsibility when its product is at fault, instead of trying to pass the buck to someone else. Tom was perfectly justified in taking the MB manufacturer at its word.
Most Socket A heatsinks have a thermister inside the middle of the socket. But they basically do buggerall unless you have some utility running in the system tray all the time.
However if the CPU's fansink is plugged into the motherboard's CPU fansink header connector & your bios is set to 'auto-shutdown on CPU fan failure' or something like that, then your computer will just shutdown straight away when it detects the failed fan.
What Tom was I assume testing was the internal thermistor that all AMD Palomino cores have (Athlon MP, Athlon XP, & Morgan cored Durons).
In which case, if the mainboard is compatible & is able to read the intenal thermister inside the AMD CPU then the CPU will just throttle back more 'n more as it gets hotter & hotter, eventually when it hits the maximum barable temp it will shutdown
As far as I know, so far the only Socket A boards compatible with the Palomino's intenal resister are the latest Seimens boards, they of course still have thermisters inside the socket for compatibility with older T'bird Athlon & Spifire Duron cores, too.
I used to work with all kinds of custom ICs and trust me, 700F is perfectly possible. I've even seen circuits that worked pretty well with components at about 300F. When I was a beginner HW engineer I was looking into problems with a board we were making, and I wanted to see if some components were overheating. Stupidly I touched them with my finger. Ouch!. My finger touched the component for far less than a second and I was severely burned. Think "touching a soldering iron tip with your finger" type burned.
This isn't to mention all the times when a layout error resulted in powering on a system and watching components explode, fire, smoke, etc.
An electric burner doesn't heat up very quickly compared to fried electronics. The reason why is simple. An electric burner dissipates a few hundred watts over an area that's at least 5cm by 5cm. When a chip fries you can dissipate 300W over an area that's less than 1cm by 1cm. That's a lot more energy in that small area.
I've seen many components that were fried and the solder disappeared. Seeing as it takes a temp of about 400F to melt solder, it would take a lot more to flash it into nothingness.
But don't trust me. Miswire some electronics and see for yourself.
So what if a little extra heat can kill your CPU more quickly. What does an 1.4GHz T-bird cost now? $115?
/. added space is removed) 404s.
Trouble is, not everybody can afford to buy a new CPU every few weeks when their old one burns out.
Incidentally, your sig (even when the
I pledge allegiance to the flag...
of the Corporate States of America...
Zalman makes one, too...
Nicotine free Amish .sig.
Fortunately, AMD honored the warranty on the chip because I was using it in an "approved" configuration, and replaced it with a 1.2Ghz (!) chip for free. I'm not sure if Intel would do something like that (especially given their financial shape). But it has definitely made me a more loyal AMD customer, despite their debatable thermal issues.
-all dead homiez
Really? Hmmm, I assumed it was just non-toxic thermal glue. Well, since this happened several months ago I guess I'm fine.