Pushing a CPU to Heat Death, Intentionally

sdougal writes "This site is showing a Pico-ITX board running Ubuntu with no cooling whatsoever. They even let the public guess how long it would last: 'Last week thousands of you placed bets on how long the new Pico-ITX board from VIA, the VIA EPIA PX5000EG, can last without any cooling whatsoever. An ARTiGO Builder Kit was offered as the grand prize. Yesterday afternoon the voting stopped and the Naked Pico Challenge started in earnest. We simply loaded up Ubuntu 8.04, set it to work playing an mpeg-4 video and then removed the heatsink, leaving the CPU and VX700 chipset bare to the world. We recorded the event here in this video and set up a live video stream so you punters can keep a watchful eye on the PX5000EG as it works away.'"

Comments

Ehh, it's been done before

[elrous0]

Anyone remember Patrick Norton frying that CPU on "The Screen Savers" back in the TechTV days? Patrick and Leo were building their annual "Ultimate Gaming Machine" (using all the best components available at the time) and his Nortoness forgets to put the heatsink on the CPU. They turn it on, and within minutes, they smell something burning. They had just fried one of the most expensive CPU's you could buy at the time, right there in front of God and the nation.

It was an expensive lesson in the importance of the heatsink.

Of course, many of us can remember back when CPU's didn't even need heatsinks. My first build was a 486SX with a zif chip slot and no CPU cooling--hard to believe now.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[TheGratefulNet]

I was at one of the audience tapings for 'TSS' in san francisco, a few years ago. very sad to see the show leave, taking all that good geek (true geek) talent with it.

I once sent an amd k8 system to a friend in the mail. I made the mistake of leaving the big heatsink (I think it was a barton chip and those were VERY hot back in the day) attached. the pc was sent ground, I think, and so it didn't get the best treatment. turns out that the heatsink came off the cpu socket and was doing some kind of 'round the world tour' inside the pc case! when he opened it up, there were ding marks from the sharp edges of the heatsink all over the mobo ;(

that was bad. but it gets worse. my 'genius friend' decided to just try it as it was and not even bother to fix the heatsink back to the chip!

I think in 5-10 secs, he -guaranteed- that that system will never run again. I would have liked to know if the mobo was still working - but now, the whole thing is toast.

he didn't know? really? a BIG HUGE HONKING heatsink and he thinks he can turn on a system without it?

sheesh.

now, that was years ago. today with the core2 arch, you almost don't NEED a heatsink. its amazing. I have overclocked core2 chips (see 'BSEL mod' for changing 800fsb to 1066fsb via some conductive paint) and STILL the chip is cold to the touch when I run memtest86. my bsel mod photos are here, btw: http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=bsel&w=47907743%40N00

its now my usual procedure to install a fan speed control and set it to MIN for all my core2 systems that I build. I love the fact that even at slowest rpm, it still never gets hot enough to even pull your hand away from the hs/fan. amazing..

I also do have a via epia that I use for my mythtv box:

http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2010/1890660635_273662e3c9_o.jpg
http://farm3.static.flickr.com/2299/2005750966_a1b8d242b3_o.jpg

in that 2nd photo, you can see its drawing 24watts (with a kill-a-watt lcd meter). its 100% fanless, uses a 1ghz cpu but it DOES get quite hot to the touch so I leave the top case skin off; that way I can get by with no fan at all. its been doing my myth-tv recording (using hdhomerun HD tuner box, networked) for about half a year now; no reboots and very reliable.

low power systems are cool ;)

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[EvilIdler]

A former cow-orker did something daft like that with an AMD around the early Duron/Athlon days.
He connected an 800MHz Athlon without the heatsink. Four seconds after the power was switched on,
he had a nice, big hole where the CPU was. I would have loved the pictures of that :)

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[tomhudson]

I ordered a Tunderbird 900mhz when they were "the big thing." The guy who was building it fried 6 CPUs and 4 motherboards before he figured out that it wasn't a good idea to bench-test them without a cpu fan. Helps to read the instructions ...

Another guy (who builds systems "on the side") asked me about one that he similarly toasted - it would boot, but wouldn't run Windows. I told him that he now had a very expensive dos-box, and to enjoy running the original Doom at 1.2 ghz.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[Technician]

They turn it on, and within minutes, they smell something burning.

The better one was the Tom's Hardware one where they tested an AMD chip and Intel chip by removing the heatsink on a running game. This was right after Intel came out wiht the Speed Step tech stuff that everyone scoffed as it would slow down the processor. It slowed down all right, but didn't fry in a second like the AMD chip did.

I would love to see a repeat test with the low power chip line-up. The 1 watt VIA processor against the new 4 watt Intel Atom. I would guess the Atom would slow down to reduce power, but not self destruct. Playing video may crash as it would no longer keep up, but it would be unharmed and re-bootable after the heatsink was replaced.

Anyone care to run a side by side test and post the video including the reboot after crash?

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you 'ork' a cow? And is it legal in your state or country?

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[sm62704]

I've had two CPUs die from heat death when their cooling fans became clogged with dust, cat hair and pot smoke. The latest box's motherboard has a thermometer hooked up so if it reaches a certain temperature the power will shut off.

It's gotten flakey lately when booting to Windows (although it boots to Linux flawlessly. I'm not sure if this is a good or bad thing to say about the respective OSes). The default is Windows, and it would reboot continually until Windows finally "caught" (unless I told LILO to go to Mandriva).

The other day I turned it on and went out for a beer; it's been the center of my living room stereo, with a few thousand MP3s ripped from my CDs, tapes, and LPs. When I got back it was shut completely off.

My house has no carpeting, so I'd loaned my vaccuum sweeper to a friend. I'll get the sweeper back before I open it up, but I'm wondering if the power suply fan is what gave out this time and fried the power supply, or the CPU fan gave out and fried the CPU, or if the temperature sensor had something to do with it.

When the CPU fans died in earlier incarnations, the lights would blink momentarily before going dark. They don't even do that now. I'm not making any bets, but if I were a betting man I'd bet the power supply is dead. In a quarter century of building and repeiring PCs I've never had a power supply die. Have any of you lost the power supply in a PC?

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess I must be old, when I read your comment "Many of us remember when CPU's did not even need heatsinks" and you mention a 486SX... I figured it would at least be something you found in the C64 or the Intel 8048 8-bit microcontroller running at 1.79 MHz from the Philips G7000. And lets not forget the price CPU, MC68000.

Anyway, i'm sure people can find older cpu's they remember, but, really... "back when cpu's did not even need heatsinks" does not compute into a 486..

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[Torvaun]

I work as a technician, and I've seen a fair number of power supply deaths, including one truly bizarre power supply that failed in such a way that it now kills motherboards. Usually they're either old or crappy, usually both.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[Eg0Death]

You've never seen a power supply die in 25 years?! Wow! That seems to be one of the most common causes of PC "death" I see. I bought a $20 test device to confirm the deadness of PSUs.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[frosty_tsm]

I've had two CPUs die from heat death when their cooling fans became clogged with dust, cat hair and pot smoke. I'm not sure if this story should result in a LOL-cat or a computer-shaped bong...

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[Anonymous Coward]

One of my first computers was a 486 with an optional math co-processor. We decided to buy a co-processor to run a 3D cad application but the store only had a 386 co-processor. We took it home and plugged it in only to find it produced buggy results due to heat.

Fortunately I had a race car lug nut lying around so I put it on the chip and it ran fine for as long as the computer ran.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[mrchaotica]

I ordered a Tunderbird 900mhz when they were "the big thing." The guy who was building it fried 6 CPUs and 4 motherboards before he figured out that it wasn't a good idea to bench-test them without a cpu fan.

I built myself a 500MHz Athlon system back when they first came out, and a few years later I happened to have the case open and noticed that I had never plugged the fan in!

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[master_kaos]

I bought a $20 test device to confirm the deadness of PSUs.

Wow, why? I use a (basically) free paper clip. Connect one end of the paper clip to the green wire, and the other end to any black wire (ground) and press the power button... if it doesnt power up, means it is dead, if it does power up it is most likely fine

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[Feanturi]

I've seen a few power supply deaths, in which case two of the systems had been working fine right up until the last time they were turned off. One of them had a bad switch (old AT) which made it difficult to turn the system on, so the user had stopped turning it off altogether, for about a year. Then I needed to install a network card in their system so of course had to turn it off. It never powered up again after that, once the system had cooled, rewiring the switch didn't change anything, and the PSU needed to be replaced. Temperature change killed it.

Another one was one of my own, that was near a window, and that side of the room got very cold in the winter. My systems always run 24/7 because this way the internal temperature stays somewhat consistant, avoiding chip creep and spreading solder joints. But then one day, when it was particularly cold out and so also very cold in that corner, I wanted to move another hard drive into it. At first it powered back up for about 30 seconds then shut down. Tried starting it several times but each time the running interval got shorter, until finally, it just wouldn't turn on at all. Replaced PSU and all was fine. Temperature change killed it.

A third one, this time the one in my gaming rig, developed its problem while in use. I was playing Oblivion or something intensive like that, and it was summer, very hot outside and in - my apartment is very poorly insulated as you may have guessed by now. The system started shutting down about every half hour, so after a couple instances of that I stopped playing, but later in the evening when things had cooled down, it was still doing it. Replaced the PSU and it ran fine after that. Temperature killed it.

Quite a few hardware failures I've encountered, CPUs, hard drives, video cards, whether my own or friends or work-related, I've been able to blame on temperature one way or another.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[onkelonkel]

Well, we used to use big gumboots, but nowadays most folks prefer velcro mitts. And sheep.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[Vancorps]

I originally ran my 500mhz Athlon as well, after a few years the fan stopped working and I never noticed until a friend had a 650mhz that he wasn't using anymore and gave it to me. I used that 650 until last year and it still works great!

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[twistedsymphony]

I built a liquid cooled system a few years back. As part of the kit they included a little jumper cable to power up the PSU with the cooling system in place before you put in the mobo and other parts (such that you can test for leaks and whatnot). It's basically just a 2" piece of wire with a prong on each end to plug into the PSU connector. I've used that little wire for testing PSUs more times than I can remember.

Using that in addition to a multimeter (something you probably already have if you tiker) you can fully diagnose pretty much anything on a PSU.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[TheGratefulNet]

Have any of you lost the power supply in a PC?

quite a few times. the last few were due to the 'chinese capacitor' problem (they blew their fillings). search and you'll find examples of where the caps started to expand and break their 'plus sign' seals on the top of their cans. I've had a netgear switch and 2 motherboards suffer the 'blown chinese cap' problem. once you have seen what a good and a blown capacitor looks like, its just simple visual inspection. and often, you can unsolder the old one and replace it with a new one that doesn't cost much. btw, if you do this, don't cheap out - get a new cap that is a bit higher in voltage and also temperature level. why not - its only a few pennies more and you'll end up with a better built unit after you repair it. it literally will work better than new (less future failure rate, I mean).

my last blown power supply was a coolmax fanless design. over $100 for that and it worked for about 2 or 3 years, almost 7x24. when it blew, it created so much 'burn smell' that I decided not to even try to repair it. I won't recommend the fanless supplies like that anymore, though.

so yes, they do blow. mine did, but it did run for several years before giving up.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[flibuste]

Check your motherboard. If capacitors look bumped anormaly, your motherboard is dying slowly and is the root cause of your problem. I have experienced those exact symptoms recently, and bought a power supply for nothing...

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[TheGratefulNet]

the new lcd PS testers are pretty cool. get one. they test for in-tolerance voltages and ARE quite nifty to have around.

when building a $200+ system (ie, ANY system) it pays to test the new PS with this $20 device first. why just TRUST the ps? a lot of them are even shipped bad.

invest in the $20 device, test each PS before you connect it to the mobo and you won't end up sacrificing your brand new mobo just to learn that sometimes, vendors do ship DOA PS units or ones that are not in tolerance on some of the voltage rails.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[TheGratefulNet]

was this it?

(saw that during a search on flicker. the cakage in that heatsink is both amazing and disgusting.)

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[billcopc]

Perhaps I'm expecting too much here, but I'm not at all impressed by a 24-watt power draw, considering the inflated price of mATX components.

The average entry-level Intel-based desktops I sell, they eat 50 watts. They don't run fanless, but they are effectively noiseless beyond a foot. This is for a 2ghz Core-2 with 2gb ram and a SATA hard drive. Considering the Intel puts out at least twice as much performance as the Via, plus the second core.

I have yet to put them to work as servers and media centers, mainly because I don't have the time and my old gear still works well (XBMC + a weak old AMD X2). Still, I see very few advantages for the Via when compared with today's uncrippled desktops. Five years ago, sure, Via was unique, but they've been resting on their laurels for too long.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[tzanger]

I think he was trying to verify past the "it powers on" stage and eliminate the "most likely" part of your statement. :-) Also, just because it powers on at no-load (what you and gp are doing) doesn't ensure that it is still capable of delivering regulated power under rated load. You need a good resistor bank or active load to test that.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[Major Blud]

I just looked up BSEL mod and this is really interesting. I have a e4400 which uses 800Mhz bus speed. This mod will bring my chip up to 1066Mhz? Have you had any processors die because this mod was applied?

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[Hatta]

Yes, my last PCs death was due to a bad power supply. To be fair, the fan had been intermittent for at least a year before the power supply went. Had I changed the fan in a timely manner, I'd probably be using the same PC today. As it happened, it was a good excuse to upgrade entirely.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[Anonymous Coward]

Just a note, a lightly loaded psu within tolerance voltages due to the tester may not always give the right tolerance voltages when actually loaded.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[Eg0Death]

The device also shows faults on 'partially' functional PSUs. The PSU may provide enough power to start but have faults that result in other system dysfunction.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[iamhassi]

"The better one was the Tom's Hardware one where they tested an AMD chip and Intel chip..."

I couldn't find the video on Tom's Hardware but this video was uploaded in 2005 and I found this article from 2001 talking about the video so Tom "Pushed a CPU to Heat Death, Intentionally" seven years ago making this article Not News Worthy.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[harry666t]

I actually remember 486s and such, and I really miss it how silent* they were... If you won't count the hard disk of course.

* compared to my 5 year old Celeron beast which's fan is making and impression of producing more noise than a herd of datacenters.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[Anonymous Coward]

Come back in 6 months to a year and tell me that it is still that quiet. A fanless system is just as noisy now as it will be then (excepting hard drive noise and we're almost to the point we can get rid of that as well, I've been using 2 gig flash cards and/or network booting for mine).

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[isotactic]

Paper clips? What if you're in the jungle? What would you do then? That's why I check my power supplies with toenail clippings and spit.

-Take that McGyver.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[sootman]

he didn't know? really? a BIG HUGE HONKING heatsink and he thinks he can turn on a system without it?

Not as dramatic but equally dumb: a friend had a small-form-factor Compaq Deskpro. Very tight little case. Shipped with a PIII/500 but he bought it used with no CPU. He decided to upgrade to a PIII/800. He bought one that was for a regular Deskpro and of course it didn't fit--so he used a Dremel to grind away almost half of the heatsink. Let's see... more-powerful chip, smaller heatsink, small case with limited airflow... I told him I didn't think it was a good idea, he said it wouldn't be a problem. He did the operation on Monday or Tuesday and it was dead by Friday.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[Megane]

I lost a 1GHz T-bird one day because the heat sink fell off. I was sitting there watching an MPEG-2 with a friend (I had just installed the codec and was trying it out), then CLUNK THUNK, followed by a BSOD, followed by the PC powering down. It turned out that one of the heat sink mounting studs on the socket had broken. And since this was a tower case, the heat sink fell down, off of the CPU.

It was sufficiently old by then that the lowest-end chip I could find to replace it was a 1.3GHz Duron, which I still use. However I replaced the tower with an Antec quiet case, since it is the living room video PC.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[SL Baur]

Have any of you lost the power supply in a PC? I've lost three, but only one was in a PC class machine. First was an m68k box on a hot August day in a house with no air conditioning, a Sun 3/260 in an area where the air conditioning had been turned off over the weekend to "save money" and the third was on a Lenovo notebook computer.

I've had two monitors lose their power supplies as well.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[Anonymous Coward]

My first self assembled PC was a 486SX as well, with no heatsink. But that lasted only a week or so until I found out that with an active heatsink, the thing would run stable at 40MHz instead of 25MHz.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[Anonymous Coward]

how bout a computer shaped bong with a LOL-cat sticker?

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[larry bagina]

Atom? Why bother. You can get an ARM that costs less, uses less power, provides better performance, and doesn't have a shitty instruction set from 1978.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[ady1]

How is it hard to believe? Almost all of the embedded CPUs today come with no heatsink (with comparable processing power to the 486SX or even a pentium 1)

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[baggins2001]

I usually just put my tongue across the 26 connectors and turn the power on. If my penis doesn't tingle then the power supply is bad.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[Lord Apathy]

Have any of you lost the power supply in a PC?

One morning I woke up and noticed my computer was off. I never turn my computer off. So I did what came natural, I turned the fucker back on. The powersupply blew the fuck up! I mean Boom! There was smoke billowing out the side and flame shooting out the fan port. The fucking fan in the power suppy was on fire! It was cool as fucking hell!

Fried everything in the damn computer but the CPU, memory, and graphics card. Harddrives, cdroms, tapedrive, ethernet/sound card, MB.. Gone. The only thing I can think of is it fried everything on the +5/+12V connection and since the surviving parts where 3V they lived. That is the best I can come up with.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[sm62704]

Hmm, I think (well, I sincerely HOPE) you hit the nail on the head. It should be incredibly easy to test the on-off switches (there are two), just short them out. If it's one of the switches it's a zero-cost fix! Thanks!

Since it's plugged into a power strip that all the other junk the PC needs (wireless keyboard/moste, powered speakers, amplifier for the big JBL speakers, etc) and the power strip gets shut off after the PC is shut down anyway, it doesn't really need an on/off switch, let alone two of them.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[sm62704]

caps started to expand and break their 'plus sign' seals on the top of their cans

Once as a teenaged soldering-iron hacker/nerd, I wanted to see if a cheap nine volt transistor radio would survive a twelve volt car battery.

I hooked it up, and there was a flash and a pop. Two little can capacitors had blown up.

To this day, forty years later, I still can't understand why that radio worked afterwards, but it did, for several years.

Of course, for all I know after the caps exploded, whenever Led Zeppelin came on the radio every ham radio operator in a ten mile radius cursed me. I still wonder what those capacitors were for.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[Inda]

I bought a P3 450mhz back when they first came out. Must have been 1998 at a guess.

It's still running. I can hear the original fan and it's knackered bearings screaming away in the other room as I type this (I slowly learned to ignore it). I've only turned off during holidays.

It has 3 hard drives, 2 graphics cards (one 64mb and one 32mb!), a sound card and a network card. I will admit to putting it in a nice new case a few years back but everything else is original.

I keep telling myself that I'll replace it when it dies but it never does. I've been through 2 laptops since I made that decision.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[Anonymous Coward]

I once sent an amd k8 system to a friend in the mail. I made the mistake of leaving the big heatsink (I think it was a barton chip and those were VERY hot back in the day) attached.

Except a Barton is not a K8.

Have a nice day.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[fataugie]

No fuckin way!
That's fucking cool!

Fucking flames? Fuck me!

Good thing you didn't burn your fucking house down.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[hairyfeet]

I have found that if a customer has roaches for some reason the little buggers will always go for the PSU and cause it to die in a quite spectacular fashion. I was actually at a customers home setting up his wireless network when I got to witness his desktop go first hand. It really was amazing. The PSU set off a huge spark along with an extremely loud BOOM which caused me to jump back. Luckily when this is the case usually it just kills the PSU without smoking the board. So now I keep a couple of the ultra cheapo PSUs around for those customers that keep having problems with roaches. No point in wasting a good PSU and costing the customer extra expense when the little buggers are just going to fry it anyway. But that is my 02c,YMMV

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[TheGratefulNet]

so far, I've modded a celeron 420 (heh heh - love that nomenclature!) and also an e2180.

both ran VERY VERY COLD to the touch even after the upgrade.

never before have I seen a chip run cold like that, even after 'over-bussing' like this.

normally I avoid OC since I want server stability. however, prime95 and memtest86 say that this is FINE. running a 'make -j3' on /usr/src/linux also showed no internal compiler errors (good sign that your hardware IS ok).

I would say go for it. you need only STOCK COOLING and STOCK VOLTAGE. what's not to like? ;)

on dumb mobos like I use (intel brand; mostly to get that most excellent eepro1000 gig-e chip onboard) don't even let you set FSB. so the BSEL mod is the only real way to tell the mobo that its a 1066 chip and not an 800mhz one.

fwiw, my fave server-grade mobo that is consumer-priced is this one:

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813121304R

(while they last). its an open-box (read: brand new from intel but ONLY the mobo, not even an i/o shield). but for a linux server, wow, its great! best ich9R (ahci) sata controller, best gig-e chip and has onboard video for server config use. you need NOTHING in the way of pci/pcie cards to make a very respectable software md-raid system (ahci/ich9r means you can do true sata hotswap, too). highly recommended. and yes, this board does 'sense' the BSEL modded chips just fine.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[TheGratefulNet]

your numbers are way off. way way off.

I regularly use that kill-a-watt meter on my home made pc's. I tend to build in the order of 10 pc's a year (just personal use; yes, I'm a member of hardware-anonymous but I stopped going to meetings.)

most minimal pc's (non gaming, like business 'web' pc's) tend to boot up at about 100w and lower down to 75w when the disk parks and when its in speedstep (etc) style mode.

I've not once seen any kind of low end pc get anything even close to 50w or less.

also note the via pc I measured did not have the most efficient PS. the pico style PS (which looks like a molex header with wires!) is said to be more efficient.

I believe I also had 2 drives on that box at the time. 2 notebook drives, that is.

for a 1ghz cpu (that does mythfrontend and mysql backend plus HDTV recording, and samba and nfs and ...) its doing pretty well. you cannot touch the heatsink - its too hot - but in all this time its never failed and so I conclude that it 'just runs hot' but nothing to worry about.

so lets say a regular pc is 75w and this pc is 45w. for an always-on pc, the cost savings DOES add up. not to mention I have slightly less a/c and cooling bills since my living room is not being heated up by a more monstrous cpu and fans.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[TheGratefulNet]

Except a Barton is not a K8.

oops, you are right. been a long time and the memory is a bit blurry.

I wish they kept up the K-style naming. the 'athlon' just never really meant much and the generation numbers in K did make sense.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[dotancohen]

I built a liquid cooled system a few years back. As part of the kit they included a little jumper cable to power up the PSU with the cooling system in place before you put in the mobo and other parts (such that you can test for leaks and whatnot). It's basically just a 2" piece of wire with a prong on each end to plug into the PSU connector. I've used that little wire for testing PSUs more times than I can remember.

Using that in addition to a multimeter (something you probably already have if you tiker) you can fully diagnose pretty much anything on a PSU. Post more details about that wire. Sounds like something useful to a good portion of this audience.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[Omestes]

Back when I still did the gaming/geek bling rigs, I had to up my PSU thanks to installing a RAID 0, a new video card, and something else. The first one I got died in a week. The second one would stop working about 10 seconds after boot, this started decreasing to 5 seconds, and finally it would power up and just die. Finally it powered on, got to the Windows log-on, and died. That last time it completely fried my Mobo. Never saw anything like it before.

After that I got a Mac, and decided my "hardcore" days were over.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[inasity_rules]

I still wonder what those capacitors were for.

Probably for smoothing(filtering) the input voltage. A radio will easily function without these, especially if run off battery and not mains. On mains you'd get a nasty hum.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[Major Blud]

Thanks for the info. My machine is watercooled, so heat isn't really a big problem for me anyways. I can overclock the e4400 easily, so I'm not really sure if the 1066Mhz bus speed boost would really make a big difference. Besides, I'm a little skittish about fooling around with the pins of a processor that costs quite a few bucks to replace if fried.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[OrangeTide]

The worse thing about a PS is that it can appear to work, but actually fail to provide the right voltages under low. In some cases it can actually provide too high of a voltage when it starts heating up. This can create some very costly havoc, or at least some serious instability. Cheap power supplies are the worst, and sometimes they just pop and go up in smoke. I can only guess what that does to sensitive RAM and GPUs.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[PitaBred]

Put some metal screen over the vent slots, and you'll stop having that problem. Use superglue or even just hot glue to seal the edges, and there should be a much lower incidence of roach suicide via PSU.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[Anonymous Coward]

Laughed so hard my finger slipped while modding this up.. I think this ought to undo it.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[RadioElectric]

I've had that happen to me, I presume due to overheating. In my case the computer kept powering off and I kept turning it back on again. The third time I did so there was a bang, a flash and everything in there was dead.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[beav007]

Your ideas intrigue me, and I would like to subscribe to your newsletter. There, fixed that for you.

My 3 favorite tools are made from paperclips.

The power supply tester
Creation: Unbend a paperclip, and then bend it into a big U shape.

Usage: When you are unsure whether a PSU works (a) disconnect it from anything it is connected to (b) insert one leg of the U into the hole in the 20/24 pin motherboard power plug for the green wire (c) insert the other leg into a hole for a black wire (d) plug the PSU into power and turn it on.
If the fans spin up, then the PSU at least partially works. At this point you can use a multimeter to verify the voltages of the different rails with no load.

The CD ejector
Creation: Straighten a thick-gauge (strong) paperclip, and then put a loop in one end that is big enough to put your index finger through, at least to the first knuckle (this helps with gripping it during use).

Usage: When you need to eject a CD from a powered-down computer (laptop OR desktop), push the paperclip into the emergency eject hole. On a laptop, this requires very little force, but on a standard (5.25") Desktop CD-ROM drive, this will take quite a bit of effort.

The multipurpose grabber
Creation: Straighten a regular paperclip, and put a loop on the end, as you did for the CD Ejector. On the other end, put a 90 degree bend, 2mm from the tip.

Usage: You can use this tool to remove or move jumpers (very handy for IDE hard drives), and to remove stuck floppy disks from floppy drives (use the R/W hole or 1.44MB hole as an anchor point).


Hope that was helpful to you.



Note: why use "creation" in the instructions? Well, I've had all the necessary components sitting in my drawer for years, and they stubbornly refuse to evolve into anything useful...

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[stinerman]

I ran a P3 450 w/o a fan (just a heatsink) for quite awhile. You can remove the fan to save your nerves.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[sjames]

The worst blown power supply I ever saw was a 3 phase 480V. The caps literally exploded. It sounded like someone was trying to sledgehammer the cinder block wall down. Then the real excitement started with the EPO and preventing the halon discharge (since there was a lot of smoke but no actual fire).

Apparently, it spiked the output lines because everything in the frame was dead after that.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[Anonymous Coward]

I remember power supplies as being money. The ones people bought that would suddenly put out max voltage instead of +5vdc. This was on the old Commodore 64.

My customers paid for a new motherboard, a crowbar circuit and fuse and a new after market power supply. Never had one come back because of the power supply.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[dotancohen]

Thanks, that first paperclip is going into my bag of tricks. The CD-ejector I unfortunately know about, and once had the pleasure of shoving a paperclip into the LED of a CD-ROM drive who's LED was round. No damage done other than the fact that the LED no longer worked. As for the IDE jumpers, I use tweezers.

Thanks.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[PingPongBoy]

When I bought a 486 the power supply had a fan, and the fans in those days were noisy as hell. I bought a name brand of sorts P4 that made way less noise, but I have to hand to the electronics of today as far as laptops are concerned. My laptop is really quiet and cool--even the DVDs don't heat up. I had an old 1GHz laptop that really heated the DVDs, and the fan was noisier, especially on a hot day when it revs right up.

I don't like noisy computers, since the noise is very distracting.

BTW, why all the hubbub about burning out a CPU with no heatsink? We all know it would if it requires enough power.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[The_reformant]

Quite a few hardware failures I've encountered, CPUs, hard drives, video cards, whether my own or friends or work-related, I've been able to blame on temperature one way or another.

If it wasnt for temperature we wouldnt have all that pesky failure inducing entropy. 0K ftw I say!

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[m50d]

Yeah, but good luck finding programs to run on it.

I've got an ARM device. It's cool, but would be a lot better if I could play TA and touhou on it.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[josquint]

The mains circuit breaker tester

Straiten and bend paperclip in to a U shape, prongs about 1 inch apart.

Insert quickly into a standard 120/240v power socket. If the paperclip sparks and the lights and the lights/other devices go out, your mains circuit breaker is working.

If the paperclip sparks continuously, vaporizes, or you die, the mains breaker is probably not working so well.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[beav007]

That doesn't work down here. We don't have inches in Australia...

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[afidel]

Q-tips+rubbing alchohol is what I use to clean the gunk off heatsinks. Remove the fan either by prying it or unsrewing it, clean the tips from the front and back then clean the fins on the heatsink.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[Annymouse Cowherd]

when building a $200+ system (ie, ANY system)
My system was $199.61 XD

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[hairyfeet]

While that sounds good in theory and I may just give it a try, unfortunately a lot of my customers have those PITA Compaq Presarios along with the HP Pavilions and the Dell Dimensions and the cases are really badly designed. Especially the Compaq, which has this huge row of vents at the bottom and really poorly designed airflow. I'm afraid that if I do anything to restrict the flow,even with an extra fan it will end up fried. The worst has to be the 2000-2003 Hp pavilion mini towers. You put two hard drives into one of those and it is click death city in a week. But on those that have the full size machines I will definitely give that a try. Thanks.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[billcopc]

your numbers are way off. way way off.

Okay, the next time I build one I'll snap pictures of the kill-a-watt. I have a habit of being stubborn and rebellious, but I'm no liar.

If you want to try it out, it's an Intel E2xxx, Gigabyte GA-G31M-S2L, 2gb ram, Seagate SATA HD (any size) and an Antec Earthwatts 380 (mfg by Seasonic). I stick with the stock CPU fan, it's surprisingly quiet on the E2's.

At stock settings that reads between 45-55watts during boot. Sure, it peaks at 75-80 if you run Orthos or 3Dmark, but use it normally for a day and check the average. I could probably drop another 10 watts by underclocking it.

Conversely, my balls-out overclocked gaming/dev rig chugs over 500 watts at idle *chuckle*. The meter hits 850 at full CPU+CPU loads. That's for only one CPU and one GPU. For my own sanity (and hydro bill), I don't actually run it that hard most of the time, I dial it down to a more modest level and S3-sleep it when not in use.

Nevertheless, I'm always designing my (other) systems with noise and power draw in mind. I choose my components with great care. SPCR is a fantastic site for researching these things. My current servers are mostly mid-range processors, underclocked and undervolted. That's how I can manage a 4 TB file server under 80w.

Re:Ehh, it's been done before

[WindShadow]

This is like... the vent slots on the computer, not the roach, right?

What's the point?

[xaxa]

It's just a waste of a CPU isn't it?

Re:What's the point?

[xaxa]

Ah, the point is to demonstrate how efficient the CPU is. Fair enough, I thought this was just breaking stuff for no reason.

Re:What's the point?

[Kamokazi]

Destroying things is fun, especially done with unorthodox methods.

Re:What's the point?

[bsDaemon]

Its not for no reason, its for "science" -- at least in that 8th grade science fair sort of way. A friend of mine one time coated the inside of an altoid can with home made napalm, punched a hole in it for fuse, and tried to see how many fire crackers we could stuff in at a time and explode before we couldn't use it anymore (the answer was 12, but that was after 11 previous detinations, so, it may be morel like 12 + 11 + ...1)

Of course, we were 22 and 23 at the time...

You never know when knowledge like this can be useful to you in the future.

Re:What's the point?

[Anonymous Coward]

Just startup Vista on it, that thing will be crispy before the splash screen disappears.

Re:What's the point?

[somersault]

How long will that be though? 2 years? 3 years?

Re:What's the point?

[Z00L00K]

More interesting would be if it ends up surviving the whole exercise including the hairdryer!

Re:What's the point?

[Chabil Ha']

My favorite site of destroying thing in unorthodox manners: Meet the Etherkiller.

Re:What's the point?

[aethera]

My local Habitat for Humanity has a ReStore that sells used building materials. It seems that over a few months they can stock up quite a few toilets and marble sinks that for one reason or another don't sell. Most have slight chips or cracks or whatever. They'll run an announcement and have toilet bowling. For $10 you can swing an old bowling ball as hard as you can down the parking lots towards a field of toilet "pins." Its really excellent to see someone score a direct hit.

The rule of thumb is....

[Ancient_Hacker]

The rule of thumb among engineers is: One square inch of flat aluminum surface will dissipate one watt at room temperature and rise about 20 degrees Farenheit.

A CPU chip with 900+ pins run a bit cooler as it's a it more than one square inch if you an include the substrate, and a certain percentage of the heat will conduct itself down the pins.

Re:The rule of thumb is....

[morgan_greywolf]

I predict a lot shorter now that the page with the video is linked on the Slashdot front page.! ;)

Re:The rule of thumb is....

[morgan_greywolf]

WTF? Someone modded me insightful! Mods can't possibly be that dumb can they? (Yeah, yeah, I must be new around here... ;)

Re:The rule of thumb is....

[ColdWetDog]

And now your modded "Offtopic". That'll learn you.

Bog knows what this will get modded as - Off-Off topic, or is that Redundant?

Re:The rule of thumb is....

[IllForgetMyNickSoonA]

There are quite a few guys around here who moderate "insightfull" instead of "funny" because "funny" gets you no karma and "insightfull"... well, does. :-)

Re:The rule of thumb is....

[contrapunctus]

You don't need to know how thick it is? 'cause I guarantee this won't work with aluminum foil for example.

Re:The rule of thumb is....

[Anonymous Coward]

Apparently it works both ways.

Re:The rule of thumb is....

[Anonymous Coward]

I wish I could mod it as Bad Grammar. "That'll learn you."? Geeze.

Re:The rule of thumb is....

[twistedsymphony]

WTF? Someone modded me insightful! Mods can't possibly be that dumb can they? (Yeah, yeah, I must be new around here... ;)

Where's the moderation option for "-1 WOOOSH!" when you need it...

Re:The rule of thumb is....

[Anonymous Coward]

the formula for convective heat transfer (transfering heat from the surface of the heatsink to the air) doesn't involve thickness. A very thinly-sliced 12"x12" sheet of aluminum, uniformly heated to 200F, will transfer just about as much heat/second to the air as a thick plate of 12"x12"aluminum @200F will (there will be some differences, because the plate has a *bit* more surface area, but I digress...)

However, CONDUCTIVE heat transfer (getting the heat to go from the "hot" end of the heat sink to the tip of the fin) is directly proportional to surface area. This means that, were you to use a single sheet of aluminum foil as a "fin" on your heatsink, you would not be able to get the heat to actually travel effectively to the tip of the fin where it could be removed via convection. Thus you'd wind up with a very hot "hot" end of the heatsink (near the chip, which does you no good), and a cool "cold" end of the fin (which is worthless, as convective heat transfer is proportional to the difference between the surface temp and the air temp). If you were to instead use a thick sheet of aluminum as your "fin", that would allow the heat to easily travel from the "hot" end to the tip of the fin, where the air could take it away.

However, you can get the best of both worlds by using multiple thinly-sliced sheets of aluminum. Same cross-sectional area as the thick slice (for good conduction), and maximum surface area (for convection). Which is exactly what most heatsinks look like.

Re:The rule of thumb is....

[Anonymous Coward]

"20 degrees Farenheit." A true engineer uses metric.

Re:The rule of thumb is....

[Bloodoflethe]

Aluminum foil is great for heat dissipation. If you fold it right and have a good way of attaching it, it'll work decently well except for high heat applications. Heat sink manufacturers have created foils of aluminum that work better mainly because of how it is shaped for surface area maximization and the thickness is so that there aren't creasing, breaking and fusing issues.

I'm not completely certain on that explanation, but that's the general idea.

Re:The rule of thumb is....

[Malc]

What kind of engineers use [Fahrenheit] and inches?

Re:The rule of thumb is....

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoops, should be "However, CONDUCTIVE heat transfer...is directly proportional to THICKNESS (cross sectional area)"

Re:The rule of thumb is....

[Z00L00K]

Only the retired or dead.

Re:The rule of thumb is....

[gristlebud]

A true engineer would say that it dissipates about 3.4 BTU/hr.

Re:The rule of thumb is....

[moeinvt]

I mod all the people who modded you "Insigthful" as "Funny".

Re:The rule of thumb is....

[Hasmanean]

>If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.

The first fleas (carried by rats), nearly did once.

They used to build houses in England with straw on the floor, and thatched roofs. Rats, feces, etc., would all get embedded into the straw.

Re:The rule of thumb is....

[IllForgetMyNickSoonA]

Justified. :-)

Re:The rule of thumb is....

[thesolo]

Since when do modern engineers use inches & Fahrenheit?

Re:The rule of thumb is....

[thefekete]

Aluminum foil is great for heat dissipation. I have to agree, my head remains very cool during the summer months and I don't have to worry about the government stealing my thoughts either!

Re:The rule of thumb is....

[xalorous]

It's a saying from the South.

The video

[nawcom]

They should make the mp4 hours of video of hardcore pornography, and we can all make bets on what the final frame that it shows before locking up and shutting down will be about. Blowjobs, anal, AtM, Bukkake, fem domination, tentacle sex, etc. It will bring more people to RTFA and WTFS (Watch The Fucking Stream).

Re:The video

[nawcom]

The title of TFA is, after all, "Naked Pico Challenge".

Re:The video

[Kamokazi]

Go to redtube, take a cold shower, then come back, ok?

Re:The video

[Anonymous Coward]

where is -1 advertisment when you need it

Re:The video

[Anonymous Coward]

AtM?

Re:The video

[Anonymous Coward]

why isn't parent marked at +5 funny

Re:The video

[Kamokazi]

Yes, I'm advertising a (somewhat) popular free porn site, because clearly I somehow make money off of it, despite not poviding a hyperlink with a referral code. I'm clearly not making a joke at the fact the parent poster seems a little more 'excited' than he should. Anonymous Idiot.

Re:The video

[fbjon]

I'm not sure I want to watch what a naked diminutive entails, and why it is a challenge.

Re:The video

[Anonymous Coward]

Arse to mouth - having anal sex with a person, then putting your penis in their mouth (without cleaning it in between).

Re:The video

[mgblst]

We used to play a drinking game based around porn cards. You need to guess tits, vag, cock. Wrong, you drink. And if you guess bj (since there was only 3 in the pack), everybody else drinks.

Re:The video

[Anonymous Coward]

atm = arse to mouth....nice

If there is just..

[atamagabakkaomae]

an MPEG4 video player running the CPU will probably last forever (or at least until the heat gun experiment). Not enough load..

Re:If there is just..

[bubulubugoth]

That's is what I was thinking off...

Even the via motherboards has on-chip video decoders, so, this kind of work will not add many load to the cpu...

Re:If there is just..

[arivanov]

The video decoder is in the chipset which shares heatsink with the CPU. So there is no free lunch here.

However, via has extremely good thermal throttling. It can probably run for a year without a heatsink.

This is a marketing scam, not a test. They know it is least likely to fail.

Must...resist...saying

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

slashvertisement. There I said it.

VIA showing off their board, offering a VIA-equipped toy to someone, disguising the entire thing as a geek event and plastering it on geeky sites. Gee, that sure is great news for nerds, stuff that (doesn't) matter...

Re:Must...resist...saying

[ekimminau]

Put a micro camera inside the case and close it up so it gets no air circulation.
Here we have the new ABC corp multi-Quad core CPU, over clocked to 50X standard. We are going to remove the heat sink and see how long it will last here in the absolute zero room with the case wide open and all the fans turned off.
Yes, this is a flame bait to the vendor in question but just how worthy is it to say an "ultra low voltage" cpu/motherboard can survive in a open office cooled to ~68 degrees F. with an open case playing a 1/8th screen resolution video on an external display?
To me? Worthless.
Want a nuce comparison?
How long can your cell phone with 3G networking survive in your hand while watching streaming video live from the internet? At least it is performing streaming video via cellular networking with its own dedicated power, storage and display. And my cellphone does it daily.

Re:Must...resist...saying

[SydShamino]

But will it blend?

Re:Must...resist...saying

[Z00L00K]

Wrong thread - should have asked it in the HTC thread...

The correct question here is "Will it cook?"

Re:Must...resist...saying

[crazybit]

it is actually very interesting. They are showing us (live) how long it will take to burn their chip if the cooler breaks.

I will like intel to do the same kind of tests with their products.

Re:Must...resist...saying

[SydShamino]

It was a comment on the OP's claim: "Gee, that sure is great news for nerds, stuff that (doesn't) matter..."

I merely pointed out that some things can be blatant advertisement and still be cool as hell.

Ummm, copying VW folks?

[R2.0]

They've been doing this with aircooled VW engines for probably 50 years at shows and races. Pull the fan belt, drain the oil, and put a brick on the accelerator. Everyone pays a buck to bet on the time, and with any luck the engine explodes spectacularly, much to the crowd's pleasure.

Yet again, "on the internet" somehow makes it original...

Re:Ummm, copying VW folks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, well... everyone everywhere should stop doing interesting things, because someone, somewhere may have done something similar. You don't per chance work for the US Patent Office do you? Software Patent Division?

Re:Ummm, copying VW folks?

[GreenEnvy22]

There is also a cool video of some guys draining the oil out of a Kawasaki sportbike, and running it at redline. For some odd reason I can't seem to find it online, but basically they run it until the exhaust eventually catches on fire and the thing seems to die. The next day they fill it back up with oil, and it starts right up :)

Re:Ummm, copying VW folks?

[geekoid]

Who said it was original?

Re:Ummm, copying VW folks?

[Jeng]

Funny, I thought the common perception of the Patent Office was that you could take any item, add internet to it and you could then get a patent on it.

So no, I would have to say that he does not work for the Patent Office.

Re:Ummm, copying VW folks?

[Anonymous Coward]

Early steam locomotives were intentionally crashed into one another for entertainment of crowds. Steam boiler explosions killed quite a few spectators so it died out. I remember a photograph of the moment of impact of one of these exhibitions. The photographer was known as 'one-eye' after this closeup photo was snapped.

Re:Ummm, copying VW folks?

[Free the Cowards]

You, sir, are an asshole, and I am quite sure that you have never managed to do anything original in your life.

Not all CPUs require heat sinks

[russotto]

So what happens if it runs indefinitely?

Re:Not all CPUs require heat sinks

[morgan_greywolf]

So what happens if it runs indefinitely?

Exactly. Neither my 8088, 80286 nor my 80386 boards had fans or heatsinks on the processors. I remember thinking "Wow, the 486 requires a FAN and a HEAT SINK? Damn, that thing must run hot!"

Of course, now they're just par for the course.

Re:Not all CPUs require heat sinks

[fishbowl]

My TRS-80 Model 1 would sometimes do funny things after long sessions.
Since the heat from the circuits dissipated up through the keyboard, it became uncomfortable to use, and if you kept using it, unpredictable things would happen.

I didn't understand enough in those days to realize my problems were correlated with heat, even though I knew people who were overclocking their Z-80s :-)

Re:Not all CPUs require heat sinks

[PalmKiller]

I replaced my 8088/8086 chips with NEC V20/V30 respectively (which had the 80186 instruction set in them...and as such had some of the important instructions for memory moves and multitasking, this was improved in the 80286), plus you could up your clock speed then and really fly even though it already had about 30% more speed just by swapping the chip. Sometimes though if you clocked the v20 too high, you needed to add a heat sink for stability but never a fan.

Re:Not all CPUs require heat sinks

[Ptur]

Eh? My 486DX2-80 used to manage with just a tiny heatsink....

Re:Not all CPUs require heat sinks

[raynet]

Hmm, my 80286 12MHz did have a heatsink, tiny slab of aluminium, but it had one. And 80386sx 16MHz, that was my next machine, did also have a heatsink that was about 0.5cm thick. And yes, with 80486dx2 66MHz you needed a fan.

Re:Not all CPUs require heat sinks

[morgan_greywolf]

Eh? My 486DX2-80 used to manage with just a tiny heatsink....

So was it a Packard-Bell or an Acer Aspire?

Re:Not all CPUs require heat sinks

[Gospodin]

If you bet "indefinitely", and it runs that long, then you win!

Hey, as the Radio Shack ads say: you've got stupid questions, we've got stupid answers.

Re:Not all CPUs require heat sinks

[toddestan]

How was the airflow through the case? I think fans were recommended on anything 66Mhz or faster, but in practice you could often get away without one. Especially if you didn't have a standard AT style machine which put the CPU in the front of the computer with all the expansion cards in the way blocking the airflow.

Re:Not all CPUs require heat sinks

[Ptur]

Why? It was 100% build by _me_

Why should it even crash..

[SD-Arcadia]

If a CPU is going to crash or go up in smoke after heatsink removal under load it will do so within 30 seconds. Since it hasn't done so yet and considering it's a 1W energy efficient CPU the only effect should be a reduction in its longterm lifespan (maybe it will only run 2 years rather than 8). I don't see the excitement here, until they take a hairdryer to it which they say they will do after two weeks. That should be interesting.

Re:Why should it even crash..

[Clete2]

I agree. I don't know much about the hardware they are using, but my old Pentium III 933MHz lasted for months without a heatsink. To be honest, I put a house fan on it and it kept cool, but still. Sometimes, it would be fine without even a fan. That CPU would take about an hour or so before it would overhead to the point of crashing (not under load). Under load, like playing an MPEG video, it would take about 5-10 minutes.

Anything more than 10 minutes or so and it will make it indefinitely.

Re:Why should it even crash..

[Dannkape]

5 years ago I had a couple of old (450mhz?) computers that I had to check if were working or not, and if possible merge into working units.

On one of them I came a few screens into the DOS-part of the win98 installation, before it started to behave strange/crash. I had a quick look into the tower, and noticed I had forgotten to put back the heatsink after swapping CPUs... I burned my finger touching the CPU, but it worked just fine later.

So, yupp. Either it's going to happen soon, or it will probably last until they start changing the conditions. (And given the slashvertisment, I guess VIA has already done this themselves.)

Re:Why should it even crash..

[blind biker]

Not true at all. Have you heard of electromigration? Its rate increases with temperature, exponentially (actually, by the Arrhenius law). Accelerated electromigration failure tests are and have been extremely common both in the industry as in research institutions.

Re:Why should it even crash..

[Anonymous Coward]

>> Have you heard of electromigration? Its rate increases with temperature, exponentially

No wonder it's only people from warm countries comin' up here to steal our jobs.

Re:Why should it even crash..

[Anonymous Coward]

Have you heard of electromigration? It also only happens with DC, to the best of my knowledge. A fancy name for a problem as old as the first light bulbs, prior to Tesla encouraging AC.

Re:Why should it even crash..

[SD-Arcadia]

Haven't heard of electromigration, but have seen this video back in 2001: http://www.tomshardware.com/pentium-athalon-test,video-272.html (same vid) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XrEaAMt9SnA I also have seen some modern Intel systems run without any cooling on a daily basis for months. Point is if it can manage the first 2 minutes, it most likely will manage 2, 4, or 50 weeks. That has been my practical experience.

Re:Why should it even crash..

[Anonymous Coward]

i think you just pulled it out of your ass. electromigration schmation.

Re:Why should it even crash..

[petermgreen]

and pretty much all chips are powered by DC.

Re:Why should it even crash..

[cffrost]

I had assumed electromigration was the long-term lifespan factor the GP was referring to. Are there any other non-recoverable hardware failure modes for ICs besides electromigration and environmental effects (corrosion, creep, thermal/physical stress)?

Slashvertisment

[rpp3po]

The whole thing is a marketing campaign by Via. Surprise!! The board is going to run and run....
Nice idea, but shouldn't make it to Slashdot's front page.

How about

[Phyrexicaid]

A server with all heat sinks removed, and then linked to on the front page of Slashdot. ;nspb Will it melt?

Re:How about

[Phyrexicaid]

A server with all heat sinks removed, and then linked to on the front page of Slashdot. ;nspb
Will it melt? Darnit, that will teach me to pay more attention to what I'm clicking on.

*Sigh*

Re:How about

[Constantine XVI]

Don't breathe the fumes!

Re:How about

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't tell me what to d- *thud*

Re:How about

[sm62704]

You really don't need the non-breakable space, but if you would have you got it backwards. The apersand goes before nbsp and the semicolon follows. If there are any spaces it won't work.

Will what melt, the CPU, the server, the building, or the polar ice caps?

Shit, my ice cream cone just melted...

AMDs don't need CPU fans, either

[Anna Merikin]

Like the ole Timex watch that "took a licking and kept on ticking" my desktop box, an ancient AMD Sempron 2600+ with a VIA chipset, unknown to me, lost its power connector to the CPU fan, which I only discovered by accident when replacing a hard disk drive. The CPU was hot enough to scald my finger, but neither its performance nor its stability has suffered one bit.

Of course, the heatsink was still connected. But the Sempron was IIRC most definitely NOT a low-power cpu.

Yes, I reconnected the CPU fan. But at least I know my sh*t can take the heat.

No video is available ;o{ .

Re:AMDs don't need CPU fans, either

[AdamWill]

That's because of a rather famous incident with the *previous* generation of AMD chips.

Intel had recently introduced an overheat sensor into their CPUs. They still have them, I think. There's basically a thermal probe included in the CPU packaging, and if the temperature goes over a certain critical level, the CPU starts throttling itself down, until the temperature goes down to a safer level.

Tom's Hardware (probably being paid by Intel...) did a video experiment on this. They got an Intel (early P4, IIRC) and a then-current-gen Athlon, started them both playing Quake 3, then removed the HSF.

The Intel chip promptly throttled itself down to 400MHz or so, and kept running the game (rather slowly). The Athlon crashed, hit something like 200-300 degrees C, and burned a little hole in the motherboard.

After that little stunt, AMD started building overheat sensors into their CPUs quite fast.

I saw this in action on one of my own machines, a Shuttle SN62K, a couple of years back. That machine has a known issue with the motherboard fan headers dying after about a year of use. It's also a very quiet system. I was using a 2.4GHz Celeron in it at the time. The fan header died and the fan (only fan in the machine, if you know Shuttles) stopped working. The CPU throttled itself down to 800MHz and kept right on going, for two weeks, before I actually noticed.

Re:AMDs don't need CPU fans, either

[Anonymous Coward]

The CPU was hot enough to scald my finger

Really? The CPU got so hot it went into a liquid or gaseous form? (You can't scald yourself on something solid.)

Re:AMDs don't need CPU fans, either

[yomegaman]

I also have a Celeron 2.4GHz, in a little mini-tower case, set up as a PVR with Sage TV. One day I was watching it and it suddenly turned itself off. I tried to turn it on a couple of times but it would only get a few seconds into the POST and then turn off again. I took off the side of the case and found the heatsink+fan just dangling from its power cord. One corner of the plastic frame around the CPU that the heatsink clips onto had broken, and the whole assembly just fell off. I had to order a new frame directly from Intel for $10 (nobody sells them!), and in the meantime I tipped the case over on its side so that the heatsink could rest on the CPU. When the frame arrived I put it back together and it's been fine ever since.

Re:AMDs don't need CPU fans, either

[Anna Merikin]

Not to prolong a rather meaningless thread (blush) but I was surprised by the box continuing to run this way as I was led to believe that were the HS-fan to become disconnected from the header, the box would shut itself down. I did *not* notice any throttling of speed, but I didn't obtain any data, just my feeling about the puter not having lost any responsiveness nor general slowness. (Running MEPIS-GNU-Linux 6.01)

The sides are always left off the case, but there is no other fan installed.

N.B. I had a Duron 800 which would shut itself down if the fan in the heatsink even accumulated *dust.* Of course, it had spent a year or more overclocked to ~1500 MHz before I got the Sempron and downclocked it back to stock. It died a natural death prematurely a little while later.

Re:AMDs don't need CPU fans, either

[dotancohen]

I forgot to connect the fan to my wife's AMD Duron machine after changing the grease to Arctic Silver, because it was running hot. I started smelling something, opened the BIOS because I was resetting anyway, and found the temp at 108 C! Celsius, not Fahrenheit! I've never seen anything else go over 85-90 C. I shut it down real fast, connected the fan, and it's still working to this day. God, I love AMD.

I should mention that I've got a Pentium 4 that I'm planning on running without a heatsink sometime soon. Maybe I should record it popping, it shouldn't last more than a minute or two.

Re:AMDs don't need CPU fans, either

[Zadaz]

Reading the summary I thought "If this is a publicity stunt, it's backfiring". It's freaking 2008, a cpu shouldn't be able to cook it's self. If it can, I'm not buying.

  Last week the fan on my laptop failed (Intel Celeron). It took me an embarrassingly long time to figure out why the thing was suddenly running so slow (It runs quiet anyway). But it still ran. It ended up running for a day and half straight, under load, with no fan. Replaced the fan, all is good.

Re:AMDs don't need CPU fans, either

[AdamWill]

yeah, reading your case again it sounds like you just got a lucky chip (and had a very big heatsink) :) how long was it running with no fan? what other fans did you have in the system? if you had a fairly big case fan close to the CPU, that would have helped...

IIRC, the system AMD added after the Tom's incident was more primitive than Intel's - as you describe, it just shut the system down if it went over a certain temperature, rather than throttling the CPU. But still, that's a lot better than motherboard melting time. :) I'm really not sure what either AMD's or Intel's current systems do.

Re:AMDs don't need CPU fans, either

[Anonymous Coward]

I once let a cable drop into my E4300's CPU fan. In the middle of the summer. I had a fan in my window, but no AC. My room temp was probably around 85 degrees fahrenheit. I played World of Warcraft for a week, noticed I was lagging slightly in high traffic areas but continued to raid and pvp competitively until I tried to bot a friend's toon (two copies of wow simultaneously) for some quests and crashed. Turned computer back on to see "thermal overload". I felt like a moron, but I was really impressed with the CPU. No fan for a week and still working great.

Re:AMDs don't need CPU fans, either

[Anonymous Coward]

Saw the same thing on a 1.4 GHz Duron we use for low-load web serving. The thing ran for a year without a turning CPU fan, and we didn't even notice until we opened it up to add a disk drive.

Re:AMDs don't need CPU fans, either

[dkf]

Like the ole Timex watch that "took a licking and kept on ticking" my desktop box, an ancient AMD Sempron 2600+ with a VIA chipset, unknown to me, lost its power connector to the CPU fan, which I only discovered by accident when replacing a hard disk drive. The CPU was hot enough to scald my finger, but neither its performance nor its stability has suffered one bit. It was quite possibly running faster because of the fan failure. This is because higher temperatures increase the charge carrier mobility in the silicon; the device is literally faster (I've seen this demonstrated for real on clockless hardware; impressive how large a speed variation was supported on what was essentially normal CMOS VLSI from about 7 years ago). On the other hand, I don't know whether the increased speed can lead to yet more heat and hence to more speed in a runaway reaction; it'd be fun if it could...

Re:AMDs don't need CPU fans, either

[petermgreen]

IIRC the XP was supposed to be the first AMD CPU with overheat protection. Unfortunately the motherboard manufacturers screwed up and at least earlier athlon XP systems still cooked themselves on heatsink loss (as demonstrated in the toms hardware video).

It seems the sempron 2600+ was a cut down athlon64 by which time they had thermal protection that actually worked properly.

Re:AMDs don't need CPU fans, either

[RzUpAnmsCwrds]

The Intel chip promptly throttled itself down to 400MHz or so, and kept running the game (rather slowly). The Athlon crashed, hit something like 200-300 degrees C, and burned a little hole in the motherboard.

After that little stunt, AMD started building overheat sensors into their CPUs quite fast.

AMD had been building thermal protection into their CPUs for months when THG did that test. The problem was that it relied on support from the motherboard.

Re:AMDs don't need CPU fans, either

[Killjoy_NL]

heh I remember that Tom's Hardware movie, did you also see the followup when they tried it again?

It worked perfectly, it turned out that the thermal diode on the mainboard was defective, so the CPU was not to blame :)

Re:AMDs don't need CPU fans, either

[__aardcx5948]

AFAIK, the THG test shows nothing. At the time of the test, almost all (AMD & Intel) motherboards supported thermal monitoring etc, and you had options in the BIOS to make the computer shut down when the CPU reaches a certain temperature. I know my Duron 700 (@ 1100) had this, on an ASUS motherboard. But of course, THG had to disable all this in order for the AMD CPU to be destroyed...

Re:AMDs don't need CPU fans, either

[Nakarti]

And even when they did, it needed board logic to work, and wasn;t fast enough for a heatsink drop anyway. What the PP is talking about is no fan. I had that all day on an old athlon 1400, and it crashed, but was otherwise ok. New AMD is as cool as Core 2, My 4400+ has an auto speed control that if I'm just on the web putzing around, stops completely.

Re:AMDs don't need CPU fans, either

[Ant P.]

I've got a P4 with a huge copper heatsink (salvaged from a motherboard someone threw in the trash because it had a celeron underneath it). I can yank the fan on it and the temperature tops out at about 55C under load. Too paranoid to leave the fan off though.

Re:AMDs don't need CPU fans, either

[petermgreen]

No I don't remember a followup from toms hardware, I do remember a lot of discussion about the reason for the XP burning up.

Was the retest done with the same make and model of motherboard or with a later one? I was under the impression that the proplem at the time was blamed on incorrect motherboard design.

Re:AMDs don't need CPU fans, either

[Killjoy_NL]

check my other comment here, it has a link to a page about it. Just click my name for easy access :)

Where I worked we had an intel presentation, they only showed the first clip, the guy was really embarassed when I asked him if he had the stones to show the second clip as well :)

You didn't RTFA, did you?

[NotQuiteReal]

Of course not, what was I thinking.

The maximum length of this competition test will be two weeks. At that stage we'll we'll take a hair dryer to it, turn the heating up in the room, anything to make it crash!

I really doubt

[LM741N]

that this is an experiment. They already know that the device will run indefinitely. No company would do a media event like this that would shed bad publicity on their product- except Microsoft, LOL.

Re:I really doubt

[Anonymous Coward]

Of course - but still pretty effctive.

You know that Intel's latest/greatest wouldn't last more than a few sec.

Re:I really doubt

[sm62704]

No company would do a media event like this that would shed bad publicity on their product- except Microsoft, LOL.

How about Sony and their rootkit? What about SCO and their Linux licenses? What about the RIAA and their lawsuits against computer-illiterate grandmothers, twelve year olds, and dead people?

What about Fox and American Idol?

Re:I really doubt

[daveywest]

Reminds me of a MS advertising campaign a few years back. Sys-admins got a package with a carabiner and some fancy marketing speak that said their new software would support you in a crunch.

Stupid PR people didn't notice the carabiner was the crappy kind you use on your keys. Those are boldly engraved, "Not load bearing." (Troll comment incoming:) At least they were truthful in their advertising.

"Heat Death"

[ObjetDart]

Sorry to nitpick, but doesn't the term "heat death" usually mean death by maximum entropy (i.e. no heat), and not death by heat?

Re:"Heat Death"

[oodaloop]

Yeah, I was thinking I'd rather watch a video of a CPU dieing from the Big Crunch.

Re:"Heat Death"

[elrous0]

Well, if they're talking about that kind of heat death, I predict it will last at least 10^37 years.

Re:"Heat Death"

[Ungrounded Lightning]

Sorry to nitpick, but doesn't the term "heat death" usually mean death by maximum entropy (i.e. no heat), and not death by heat?

Actually not "no heat" but "everything the same temperature". And all the other forms of stored energy evened out and/or randomized until there's no unevenness left to run an engine (or other thermodynamic process) on.

But there are information-theory interpretations of entropy, which are applicable:

The high degree of organization of the components in the chip (order) - with carefully controlled doping of some regions and not others, conductors configured to act as wires, etc. - represents a low entropy state. Raising the temperature until the atoms start moving around will reduce the order of this state - increasing its entropy - until the chip is no longer able to function.

So you could claim that it died as a result of too much entropy. B-)

Done, accidently, before

[Toreo asesino]

We had a headless linux server that one day started beeping constantly for no apparent reason. With every intention on fixing it, after a couple of weeks of it still running ok, we just assumed the speaker had died so just ignored it (the server room being sealed away as it was). Then one day we had to move the servers to another room, went to pick the machine up, and "Jesus! This thing is boiling!".

It was some ancient AMD chip that we literally couldn't buy new fans for any more, so we just snipped the speaker cable and let it carry on.

Naturally, the Linux guys claimed if it had been Windows, we'd be looking at a dead server at this point in time :)

Re:Done, accidently, before

[somersault]

Why not just buy a similar sized fan, or even a completely different heatsink/fan arrangement of approximately the right size? :P Surely it would be better to bodge on some kind of cooling than just leave it..

Re:Done, accidently, before

[Cecil]

I've got an Athlon 900 server that's been running for around 8 years at a constant CPU temperature of 90-95 Celsius at idle. Still trucking away just fine. They were amazingly hot chips, but they seem to handle it okay.

Re:Done, accidently, before

[egomaniac]

Naturally, the Linux guys claimed if it had been Windows, we'd be looking at a dead server at this point in time :)

Nonsense. Every OS makes the basic assumption that the chip is processing instructions correctly. If the chip is told to jump to address A, and instead jumps to address B because it is overheating and confused, the OS is going to crash. Doesn't matter whether it's Windows, Linux, Mac OS X, or AbsolutelyCrashProofOS-Z, it's still going to crash.

In all honestly the stability debate is getting old. The truth is that Linux, Windows, and Mac OS X are all about equally stable nowadays. All three of them pretty much only crash in the face of hardware problems or buggy device drivers.

Re:Done, accidently, before

[dotancohen]

Why not just buy a similar sized fan, or even a completely different heatsink/fan arrangement of approximately the right size? :P Surely it would be better to bodge on some kind of cooling than just leave it.. Right, I have a fan from a P4 on the wife's Duron at the moment. It doesn't fit very well and I'm scared that if the box takes a kick the blade will contact the heatsink, stopping the fan. But it works in the meantime. I should note that the Duron under the heatsink was once run at 108 C (I posted in this thread about that, see above) and it still runs fine. I myself have a hard time believing it, until I read some of the other horror stories in this thread.

Re:Done, accidently, before

[Megane]

That wooshing sound is the point going over your head. It would have been a dead server with Windows because Linux has much better thermal performance, due to the way it idles with the halt instruction. Or at least that's the common wisdom and what GP was referring to.

Re:Done, accidently, before

[dbIII]

So on linux it would be using the HLT instruction and in windows the HCF instruction?

Sorry, very old assembly code joke that most will miss, but couldn't resist.

Re:Done, accidently, before

[Eil]

after a couple of weeks of it still running ok, we just assumed the speaker had died so just ignored it

So um, nobody in your I.T. staff realized throughout this whole ordeal that failed speakers don't normally get permanently stuck in the 400Hz-tone-emitting state?

Re:Done, accidently, before

[walshy007]

as far as the cpu is concerned I agree with you, a working cpu is something that's just assumed,

but in so far as drivers for other things are concerned, I find linux detects dying hardware way better than windows, what would equate to a bsod in windows typically results in dmesg bits to the effect of ' warning, sanity check failed, xxx screwed up, should never reach that state, resetting it and trying again' then attempts to get it going again.

failing hardware is failing hardware, but less crashing is always a good thing.

FUD Ammo...

[PinkyDead]

How long before we see this up on www.microsoft.com/getthefacts/ with the headline:

"Linux will set your computer on fire."

You have been warned.

Re:FUD Ammo...

[Anonymous Coward]

If you remember the 1980s, you may know that Radio Shack had a policy that business class machines (e.g., the Tandy 5000, an early 80386), were not to be sold to residential customers. Customers would be told that the reason was due to FCC constraints. The real reason was that the primary cause of failure of those machines was *fire*. They worked fine without a heat sink fan... until they set your office on fire.

Being asked to lie to customers about this, and being asked to work more hours than were reported under federal withholding and social security, were the two reasons I quit my store manager job.

Re:FUD Ammo...

[sm62704]

What? www.microsoft.com/gettofacts/? Oh. I need more coffee, I'm getting lysdexic. DAM.

But that could be interpreted as "Linux runs blazingly fast compared to Microsoft" which I don't think even Microsoft is dumb enough to do. Otoh...

Re:FUD Ammo...

[dotancohen]

How long before we see this up on www.microsoft.com/getthefacts/ with the headline:

"Linux will set your computer on fire."

You have been warned. Have you never gotten the classic Unix message (also in Linux): "Printer on fire"?

I don't get what the big deal is...

[ramon_omar]

I mean, I can run for several hours without a heat sink or a fan.

Re:I don't get what the big deal is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, you've got water cooling. The smelly kind...

Re:I don't get what the big deal is...

[somersault]

WTF, someone has blocked off all your sweat ducts and you can still exercise for hours without dying? Wowee!

Re:I don't get what the big deal is...

[nasor]

For most slashdotters that *is* a big deal.

Re:I don't get what the big deal is...

[Anonymous Coward]

After that joke, you might need to.

Re:I don't get what the big deal is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Gotta keep the lube flowing though...

Re:I don't get what the big deal is...

[RealGrouchy]

I can run for several hours without a heat sink or a fan. There's a Lindsay Lohan joke in there somewhere, I bet...

- RG>

Re:I don't get what the big deal is...

[Anonymous Coward]

no, you can't

Re:I don't get what the big deal is...

[Anonymous Coward]

You can run for several hours?... you must be new here.

Re:I don't get what the big deal is...

[Ungrounded Lightning]

I mean, I can run for several hours without a heat sink or a fan.

That's because you're water cooled.

Re:I don't get what the big deal is...

[Hektor_Troy]

Really? How the hell do you run for hours without sweating? Or more appropriately your skin?

Re:I don't get what the big deal is...

[ramon_omar]

Really? How the hell do you run for hours without sweating? Or more appropriately your skin? In a word? Messily.

Re:I don't get what the big deal is...

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, but you have that smelly thermoregulation system called perspiration.
If I had the choice between a CPU with heatsink and a CPU that evaporates smelly water, I would still choose the former one.

Re:I don't get what the big deal is...

[mgblst]

Alright boys, hook him up to the mains. Lets see how well he does.

Time for a new pool

[Goalie_Ca]

Anyone wanna guess how long their server will last before melting?

Not just slashvertisement, LAM3 Slashvertisement..

[nweaver]

The Via is a VERY low power processor.

Since its one of the 1 GHz processors in the board, TDP is 5W.

Depending on what power-feedback is involved, the processor might actually just go "I'm overheating, throttle back" and drop down to say 500 MHz at 2.5W or so. The MPEG decoding shouldn't even take too much power, since the CN700 chipset includes hardware MPEG2 decoding.

As a bonus, the box is OPEN, which improves the cooling.

My experience with no heat sink

[VAXcat]

A few years back, I was troubleshooting a problem on my desktop. It had a Duron 800 in it. I got tired of putting the heat sink and CPU fan back on every time I made a change, so I figured, what the hell, how hot can it get in the time it takes to try and boot. It made it through the boot fine. I mused "Works great! I bet it doessn't even get that hot. Wonder how hot it is?" With that thought, I reached in and touched the top of the CPU. It was so hot that it instantaneously branded the text and logo etched in the top of the chip onto my thumbtip, before I could react and yank my hand back. For a few weeks, until it sloughed off, it was readable in reverse on my thumb...taught me new respect for the current consumption & heat generation capabilities of CPUs.

Re:My experience with no heat sink

[somersault]

And that is why if you are going to test the temperature of something, use the *back* of your finger/hand/whatever.. may hurt a little more as those areas are more sensetive, but at least if it is boiling your instinctive flinch will pull your hand/fingers away rather than pushing it down even more. For example if you need to test a metal door handle when exiting a burning building, do it with the back of your hand.. :s

Re:My experience with no heat sink

[dotancohen]

For example if you need to test a metal door handle when exiting a burning building, do it with the back of your hand.. :s That's also how you should test possibly live electrical wiring. The byproduct is that if there _is_ electricity, then you've just slapped yourself in the face for being stupid enough to touch it!

Re:My experience with no heat sink

[Anonymous Coward]

And that is why if you are going to test the temperature of something, use the *back* of your finger/hand/whatever.. may hurt a little more as those areas are more sensetive, but at least if it is boiling your instinctive flinch will pull your hand/fingers away rather than pushing it down even more No dude, you use the back of your hand because when you get burned you still have the use of your hand.
It hurts a lot less to stretch a burn on the back of your hand than to try and type (or do a million other daily tasks) with a burned fingertip or palm.

On a side note, always give an animal the back of your hand (in the shape of a fist) to sniff.
If you give them the palm & they decide to bite, the chances are much higher that you'll lose a finger and/or get puncture wounds through your hand.

Re:My experience with no heat sink

[Anonymous Coward]

The CPU branded you? That's awesome!

Re:My experience with no heat sink

[Krishnoid]

And that is why if you are going to test the temperature of something, use the *back* of your finger/hand/whatever ... of your non-dominant hand. Suffice it to say that frosted pop-tarts fresh out of the toaster oven have characteristics similar to napalm ...

Won't it just slow down?

[BlueParrot]

I was under the impression that at least some CPUs can detect temperature and adjust their clock frequency accordingly, thus meaning that they simply slow down if overheating. Is this insufficient to deal with the loss of the entire heatsink or am I missing something? I would have expected that there were mechanisms which kick in to prevent damage at elevated temperatures, even if it means simply shutting down. Maybe it is a consequence of studying nuclear physics but personally I would argue that a device should at least make an attempt to detect anomalous conditions and take measures to minimize damage. I guess it could make sense if the consequences of a chip going down due to lost cooling would exceed the cost of replacing it, but to be honest you probably want to alter your design if you have a plausible probability of such a situation.

Re:Won't it just slow down?

[Anonymous Coward]

All desktop CPUs these days have thermal diodes, and will simply stop outright if they go over temp. They may still fry (the heat isn't going away very quickly without a heatsink) but the chances of it are slim. I guess the VIA is an exception, but they're generally so anemic that you would have to do something deliberate like these guys did just to manage to get it hot.

Usually my motherboard sensor will kick in and shut down before the CPU sensor does though.

Re:Won't it just slow down?

[dave420]

Indeed. CPUs have been doing that for the last decade or so. The early AMDs didn't monitor the temperature changes fast enough to realise when the fan was taken off, and so by the time the chip realised it was too hot, it was already spewing its magic smoke. Intel's chips, back in those days, used to monitor the temperature changes a lot faster, and could indeed throttle back the clock speed to cool the chip. I remember seeing a comparison between an AMD CPU and an Intel one, back when P4s were brand new. They took the fan off the AMD chip and it burst into flames. The Intel one, with fan removed, throttled its speed and kept on working. AMD chips are muuuuch better now, and act pretty much the same as Intel ones.

Re:Won't it just slow down?

[petermgreen]

It was a four way test

IIRC the results were:

The P4 did best, it just slowed down.
The P3 crashed but worked fine afterwards
The athlon XP cooked itself
The thunderbird athlon did worst cooking itself and the motherboard too.

Re:Won't it just slow down?

[Killjoy_NL]

Bulldoody, the cause of the Athlon cooking itself was a defective thermal diode on the motherboard.

http://www.a7vtroubleshooting.com/articles/palomino_burn/index.htm

Check the story here.

Re:Won't it just slow down?

[petermgreen]

Bulldoody, the cause of the Athlon cooking itself was a defective thermal diode on the motherboard.
That is not what your source says.

Your source says that the issue was that the protection circuitry on the motherboard in question could only throttle the CU, not cut the power completely and that throttling was insufficiant to save the CPU in a complete loss of cooling scenario.

Re:Won't it just slow down?

[Killjoy_NL]

Then I stand corrected, too bad I can't find the rectification on Tom's hardware with Google, the page no longer exists :(

I distinctly remember the brand Siemens and the mention of the defective thermal diode though.

Yea but what's the cpu load?

[Sethra]

This is essentially a low/no cpu load heat test. There is no indication as to how active the core is at all. An idle processor can last a long time with minimal air cooling.

I'd be more impressed if that mp4 video were being software rendered rather than the decoding being offloaded to the graphics chip while that cpu sat virtually idle.

2 CPUs 1 Cooler?

[tepples]

They should make the mp4 hours of video of hardcore pornography Or just the "Hungry Bitches" trailer. (Wikipedia's article is safe for work because its subject is non-Free.)

Re:2 CPUs 1 Cooler?

[somersault]

ew... I can't quite see why anyone would ever want to watch that. I mean, I know some people are weird and would generally count myself as one of them.. but that video sounds almost as bad as having to judge your country's possible entries into the Eurovision song contest..

Re:2 CPUs 1 Cooler?

[AshtangiMan]

But the kermit the frog reaction video has to be one of the funniest to come out of it.

Re:2 CPUs 1 Cooler?

[Rod Beauvex]

You should see the one where he shows it to Rowlf.

Re:2 CPUs 1 Cooler?

[nawcom]

"Aww... yeeeahh... eat that shit." Best line evar.

Re:2 CPUs 1 Cooler?

[somersault]

Meh.. after having a little look and seeing Jessica Alba's extremely mild reaction, I decided it couldn't be that bad. I watched it, did feel very slightly sick at the idea, but without the smell it was easy to cope with :p The kermit the frog thing was okay, definitely not the funniest thing I've ever seen though.. probably funnier if you watch a whole string of them together.

Re:Open != better cooling

[TheMeuge]

In open air, with no fans blowing air PAST a hot object, it will cool much slower than inside an enclosure where air is brought to the object and is actively exhausted.

This isn't readily apparent in most modern equipment because hot components have their own active cooling, and the ambient air is cooler outside the case.

However, if I turn up my 3-speed 120mm case fans to Max, as opposed to Min, my CPU temperature will drop below what I am able to achieve outside.

But that is only possible when the wiring has been carefully managed to avoid heat traps.

Re:Not just slashvertisement, LAM3 Slashvertisemen

[Anonymous Coward]

not according to the A+ thing that I never bothered with...

according to them, even a slot missing at the back of the computer disrupts airflow and can cause a computer to overheat, let alone leaving the cover off...

If they really wanted to burn it...

[Osurak]

...just put a webserver on it and then link to it on the front page of Slashdot, like that guy's master's project that was incinerated by the Slashdot effect a few months back

/var/log/messages:

[dannycim]

I've made my home machine almost totally silent by using some really large heatsinks. Up 24/24 7/7. One 12V fan running super slowly at 5 volts.

If I re-encode a movie I get:

May 21 07:48:00 ganymede kernel: CPU0: Temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 4742833)
May 21 07:48:00 ganymede kernel: CPU1: Temperature above threshold, cpu clock throttled (total events = 4742833)
May 21 07:53:00 ganymede kernel: CPU1: Temperature/speed normal
May 21 07:53:00 ganymede kernel: CPU0: Temperature/speed normal

Do I care? Not really. Been like that for 3 years now. When it dies I'll swap it for a less powerful CPU and go totally silent. :)

Even with a heat sink

[future assassin]

and no fan I had an Athlon 1000 about four years ago almost catch on fire if I just didn't happen to come home for lunch. The fan failed for whatever reason and the CPU got smoking hot and started to burn all the dust around the MB. The only reason I notice is that the whole house smelt like burnt dust/hair. After unplugging the power I touched the fan about 5 min later and burnt the hell out my finger as it accidentally touched the heat sink. I had a red burn mark on my finger. I can imagine who hot it really was when it was still powered up.

duped slashvertisement

[Anonymous Coward]

Not only has it been done before, VIA has done it before. They had an ad video comparing a heatsink-less VIA processor, which kept running, to an Intel processor that froze when the fan was disconnected. That the demo has changed from playing a Quake demo to hardware-assisted video decoding only makes the demonstration easier.

Re:Open != better cooling

[nweaver]

The case fan is on the heatsink. So closing THIS case would greatly reduce the cooling, as hot air would be trapped in the case.

Re:Open != better cooling

[Anonymous Coward]

How do you bring air into an enclosure and actively exhaust it with no fans... And without antything that would violate "without any cooling whatsoever".

Wait a minute

[Anonymous Coward]

We put a px10000 on a quadrotor (http://www.et.byu.edu/groups/quad08topgun/), and physically crashed it hard into the ground several times. After some hard impacts and improper mounting the heatsink came loose.

We were running ubuntu 7.10 on ours, and it would die after about 2-5 minutes until we cranked down the heatsink and got it securely attached.

We were using the px10000 and not the px5000, so don't expect to do this with the 1GHz via...

I really doubt VIA did this blindly.

[hyperz69]

I am sure they tested this before doing it. If you notice they also put a 2 week limit on how long they let it run. At the end of 2 weeks they will mess with it by adding heat till it dies. If I had known early this would have been a pretty safe bet.

hardhack? why?

[damn_registrars]

I don't know why this is tagged "hardhack". If anything, it probably deserves to be tagged "easyhack". The only thing they did was remove the heat sink, right?

Not a challenge...

[NekoXP]

Since when was running a 1 Watt CPU without a heatsink regarded as a challenge?

http://www.genesi-usa.com/efika.php - plug plug

That system runs at 1W@400MHz, although has no video-accelerating northbridge to add to the heat, it can play that MPEG4 video just fine (I am playing something similar now). We've designed it so the 2.5" hard disk actually sits about 5mm from the top of the CPU - if anything we're making cooling harder, and there is NO heatsink. The CPU does NOT power manage into SpeedStep style states - it just runs at 400MHz or "standby" (where it cannot run code until an external interrupt).

It runs fine. Mine's been on 24/7 for nearly a year, barring moving it around and connecting it up to things like new hard disks, changing power strips or measuring the power it uses. It never overheats.

What's the challenge meant to be? Just how crappy Via's chip needs to be that it CAN'T run at 500MHz on a 90nm process, and do without a heatsink of some kind?

Re:Not a challenge...

[ichigo 2.0]

I think the challenge is the part where the public tries to guess how long the CPU will survive.

Re:Not a challenge...

[NekoXP]

Anywhere from 5 years to forever? :D

What happens if the northbridge dies before the CPU, is the challenge invalidated?

Re:Open != better cooling

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but the point is that they will -not- actively cool this chip. By opening the box they have greatly increased the amount of heat that can be dissipated by convection. So in this case, yes, an open box does equal better cooling.

*my* 486SX...

[Anonymous Coward]

...didn't even have a zif socket, you insensitive clod!

Re:Open != better cooling

[Lyrael]

Aye. My boyfriend once took the case off his xbox and left it like that. Overheated in less than fifteen minutes, I believe.

Hardware MPEG decoding

[slim]

Assuming they compiled mplayer right (and why wouldn't they, since this is basically an ad), the MPEG4 decoding will be happening in the graphics hardware. So the CPU is hardly being taxed. Have it run 'primes'; then I'll be happy.

Still an extremely attractive piece of hardware. When my TiVo Series One finally gives up, I'll be shopping for a quiet VIA box.

If it doesn't die...

[Thelasko]

due to lack of cooling, it's underclocked. Then the question is no longer "how long will it last" but "how much can we overclock it before it starts dropping bits or burns up entirely."

The word "hardhack"

[crenshawsgc]

the word "hardhack" needs to crawl back where it came from. It adds nothing to the language that can't be said better in other ways.

Re:The word "hardhack"

[Anonymous Coward]

In that case, you'd better let the bug in your ass know that its roomate will be back soon.

Back in the day....

[Monty Worm]

I used to work for a PC assembler. After a while you ended up knowing the numbers through sheer experience.

A mid range Pentium 4 (at the time 2.4Gz?) with the overheat cut off sent at 90 degrees, and no heatsink would run for about 60 seconds from room temp - ie just long enough to get into the BIOS Health screen and watch the numbers climb - if you were fast.

The same machine, with heat sink fitted but not properly would last longer, but not enough to do anything substantial with.

With the heatsink fitted, but it's fan unconnected the machine would last quite a while - possibly long enough to make it through QC if there wasn't much software to install - maybe as much as an hour. I'm almost certain some shipped. (note: the company in question went bankrupt. They aren't really missed)

We did this at Transmeta

[Dhar]

Back in my Transmeta days, I set up a demo doing exactly this...one of our CPUs playing movies without a heatsink, head-to-head with a comparable Intel and it's (hot) heatsink. It lasted all day, and only got slightly warm. Still, I always expected to get burned every time I stuck my finger on the die top for the reporters. Poor, poor Transmeta. :)

-g.

lp1 on fire...

[mkcmkc]

"Linux will set your computer on fire." And if you have an attached printer, it could burst into flames too! Surely you've heard of the famous "lp1 on fire" bug! And if your attached printer runs Linux, it could explode in a double-bad pool of flames!!! (Oh, my head hurts just thinking about it...)

Windows and Norton - real heat death

[ehud42]

Related: had a customer a few years back who brought their brand new Acer PC in - convinced it had a virus. Even had the name and diagnostic page from Symantec. Seems the 'virus' would shut the machine down during a virus scan.

Turns out the folks at Acer forgot to plug in the CPU fan. Box ran fine until the A/V full system scan started, then the CPU temp rose until the CPU high limit setting in the BIOS pulled the plug to save itself.

Don't remember if it was Intel or AMD, but it was definitely overkill for them. MS Works spreadsheet, Norton AV and a couple of flash based game sights was all it ever did.

live stream

[peachstealingmonkeys]

the video in the live stream doesn't seem to play smoothly. Can that be attributed to overheating?

Thanks a lot

[Anonymous Coward]

Wow, AMD Sempron 2600+ qualifies as "ancient" now. You made me feel very bad about my Athlon XP-M 2100+. I hope you enjoy that.

Re:hardhack? why?

[Smauler]

Hardhack is short for hardware hack.

Am I the only one who laughed...

[ScreamingCactus]

everytime he said "naked pico"?

Eventual Heat Death

[FarrisGoldstein]

universe001 ~ $ uptime 13:03:30 up 5e145 millenia, 363 days, 2:42, 1 users, load average: 0.30, 0.28, 0.23 universe001 ~ $ Kernel panic - not syncing: Attempted to kill init!

Agreed, that's easy for a 1 watt chip

[default luser]

At that low power production, the motherbboard itself will act as a good enough heatsink. What do you think draws the heat away from all the other low-power passive-cooled components on the motherboard?

And I think people are confused: hell yes they're giving the motherboard an advantage by keeping it out in the open. The air currents inside any normal room will be more than enough to keep that board cool.

The problem comes when you shove the board inside a box with no active cooling. The natural air currents in the room cannot remove the air from the closed case, so the system overheats. YES, you get more efficient cooling when you pair active cooling with a closed case, but this test does not use active cooling, so a closed case would only be a detriment.

Re:Agreed, that's easy for a 1 watt chip

[NekoXP]

I'd be curious to know what the total system power consumption of the board (CPU, northbridge etc.), and power brick gives. x86 system board manufacturers do like to tell you the power consumption of the CPU alone (1W in this case) but they haven't factored in the large northbridge with graphics, MPEG4 acceleration, and the other peripherals turned on. Playing an MPEG4 will stress the system enough and with a 4W northbridge you'd probably still need the passive heatsink for safety in a warm room.

The northbridge (is that a CLE266?) will probably burn out far before the CPU does, which makes this a silly test really.

We use external graphics on the Efika (a Radeon 9250 or somesuch) which brings the total power consumption up to 7W with a hard disk (i.e. play back an MPEG4 from hard disk and you draw 7W). The CPU stays cool, there is no northbridge, and the Radeon even in a case with no active cooling doesn't overheat.. there are better, newer processors coming out (MPC5121E) of the same specs with extra acceleration units, integrated graphics (PowerVR) etc. which have a maximum power budget of 3W, a 2.5" hard disk usually comes in around ~2.5W or lower during heavy disk access. There will be no active cooling here, no heatsinks or case fans, and it will still work..

I am just trying to fathom what the challenge actually is.

Shenanigans

[multimediavt]

1. You can't have "no cooling whatsoever"; impossible unless you contain the thing in a vacuum and suspend it magically so it's not touching any other surface. Thermodynamics 101 people!
2. What's the ambient temp in the room? If it's not at an office/home standard 68 - 72 F then you're cheating
3. The case is off!!! Please! You're cheating

All that aside I still have to yawn because telco equipment already does this stuff in environments that would have melted that rinky-dink piece of crap within hours of switching it on. What exactly are they trying to prove? Oh, and what a prize. A rinky-dink piece of crap. No thanks, I'll buy a Mac mini.

Re:Shenanigans

[JoeBuck]

Even in vacuum, you get cooling by infrared radiation.

Re:Shenanigans

[treeves]

Apparently, they don't cover that until "Thermodynamics 102".

Dead Power Supply

[kcdoodle]

Let's see.

Dead computer thingies:


2 power supplies
2 video cards
3 sticks of RAM
7 hard drives
2 mother boards
1 wireless card
5 cdroms
3 monitors
1 floppy drive
1 partridge in a twisted pair

The list of manufacturers is all across the board.

I have been building my own systems (and scavanging) since 1990.

I have built about 30 computers over the years, so I guess my MTBFs is around the industry average.

And mine survived - The article's CPU might, too

[DrYak]

And I've had my both of my pumps in my water cooling loop die at the same time (they where shitty Thermaltake Bigwater ones) on a P3 1.2GHz Tualatin based home file server.

Still as it was unattended, the sever was left on the whole afternoon. I only realised it wasn't responding in the evening. The power was still on.

The heat of the processor evaporated the cooling liquid, and melted the plexi top of the CPU block.
And I still burned my finger when detaching the remaining copper block from the CPU even after a couple of minute after shutting down the power.

But even after all that cooking, once I replaced the cooling bloc and installed redundant pumps from a real brand (2x Lain DDC), the same CPU and motherboard started happily without complaining.

Now that's something that you won't be seing with more recent and fragile CPUs.

But given that VIA CPUs don't eat big amount of watts and don't generate high amounts of heat, it is still possible the their pico-ITX board will similarily survive heatsink-less cooking. The system will crash, but the CPU & ITX may be recoverable after letting cool down.

The test I really want to see...

[RogueWarrior65]

Is this setup placed outdoors in 120 degree desert heat. Any takers?

Thanks!

[krelian]

I've had two CPUs die from heat death when their cooling fans became clogged with dust, cat hair and pot smoke. You post made me open up speedfan and I was shocked to see my core 2 cpu running at more the 65c...

I immediately pulled out a vacuum cleaner and now it's back to 33c.

Re:Not just slashvertisement, LAM3 Slashvertisemen

[Inda]

You call it a slashvertisement, it's been tagged 'slashvertisement', but I can't see a price on there.

I thought it was neat and wondered 'how much?'

Heat is wasted energy

[ChrisA90278]

In the old days we did not use heak sinks. My first conputer was a Z80 running 2Mhz and it ran CP/M just fine 10 years later we had Pentiums with forced air cooled heat sinks. Now in 2008 my Apple iMac never runs the fan, although I'm told there is a fan inside i've never hear it run. There are not vents and no air holes and the think gets only mildly warm the future wil be like the past eventually no heat sinks at all. Heat is after all wasted energy.

memtest doesn't stress the CPU

[Dr_Barnowl]

Testing memory only tests the memory, and maybe the tiny area of CPU that comprises a modern on-die memory controller. Run prime95 or something that actually does some processing.

Re:And mine survived - The article's CPU might, to

[bhtooefr]

Actually, the newer CPUs will handle it BETTER than that P3 did.

Anything older than that P3 would have cooked. That P3 went into a frozen state to save itself. The P4 and newer underclock themselves until they're running cool enough, and freeze if that's still not cool enough.

Under what conditions in the room?

[Neanderthal Ninny]

This is fun test but not an honest one. I can turn down the AC so the temperature in the room will be around 50 degrees and point the AC duct on the system and it will run longer nearly forever. In order to do an honest test this system should be placed in a controlled environment so you what is real temperature so you can honestly say this test was run a temperature controlled room and it worked.

hm

[DerWulf]

I've really been longing for a marketing stunt lately. There are definitely too few of those ... But really, if you want to impress me, build a processor that can play video fluently.

Re:hm

[Anonymous Coward]

That is the web cam that makes it studder.

*my* 386SX...

[Tmack]

...used dips, and x-win w/netscape just fit on the MFM drive I had...

tm

Why bother

[Anonymous Coward]

Can I just, ask, why bother? I don't really understand what this experiment is actually setting out to prove...that an exposed CPU will overheat? Who'd have thunk it?

Anyone else notice...

[luminate]

In the video, it couldn't even run what appears to be a low-res mpeg4 video smoothly?

lol

Re:Anyone else notice...

[Anonymous Coward]

That is latency introduced by the web cam link. Look at the other videos on the site, they show the video running smoothly.

Except

[Anonymous Coward]

"Our CPU runs for 4 days without a heatsink" would not be bad publicity.

Not giving out the promised prize, *that* would be bad publicity.

Obligatory

[wolf12886]

Exploding CPU

bad CPU

[Anonymous Coward]

Every modern Core 2 Duo and AMD X2 CPU are IMPOSSIBLE to fry like this.

They'll throttle their speed down in case their overheating.

Move along. Nothing to see here.

my guess

[ILongForDarkness]

1W maximum draw. The system isn't being stressed that much so probably 1W draw. I'm pretty sure the surface of the die should be able to disipate that much energy without going over 30C.

Satellite CPUs

[dsmall]

Hmmmmmm. What sort of processors are run on modern satellites? Are they clocked down to keep down heat which has to be radiated off without all that convenient air to dump the heat into?

Not to mention all the fun with cosmic rays, etc.

(I'm being lazy by not looking on Wikipedia, of course.)

    -- David