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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.'"
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.
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 :)