The Joys Of Losing Your Cooling Device

nitecreep wrote to us about Tom's latest article: What happens to procs when the heatsinks fall off?. Having just had my brand new fan stop working on my computer, I can sympathize. I've found that it takes my 1.2 Ghz Athlon to reach 80 degrees Celsius in about 6 minutes, from time of starting machine. The results of running without a heatsink at all are....interesting.

fire?

[donabal]

gives a new meaning to firewire...

yea. i had a quantum fireball burst into flames before...
lost a mere 20 gigs of data.

--donabal

compiling a kernel

[Steev]

I had just put together a new box, and was attempting to compile a brand new kernel on it (2.0.36 at the time). About 5 minutes into the compilation, I started getting reams of segfaults and I could not, for the life of me, find out why. Later, I discovered that when putting everything together, I had forgotten to plug in the power cord for my CPU fan. Nasty shiat, that is.

alarm

[CrazyBrett]

Not a good way [microsoft.com] of reporting the problem :)

Hitting the limits of heatsink size/weight?

[weslocke]

Here lately I've been having a small problem. Our local computer dealer has been getting in new 'cheapie' (ie. standard) heatsink/fan combos for Athlons. These things are huge... a normal sized fan stride a large slotted brick of metal. Well, this is what these new processors require I would imagine, unless of course you want to plop down $50 or so for an Alpha solution.

Well the whole problem I'm talking about is this. The heatsinks hook onto the normal tabs built onto the Socket-A, but due to the weight they can very easily shear off the smaller tab with even a moderately forceful impact.

I wonder if we aren't going to be forced to develop more active cooling for baseline heatsink/fan combos, or just find newer and better ways to mount the increasingly large blocks we have. (Hooking onto the other two tabs on the socket, or attaching directly to the motherboard via the 4 holes around the socket are two methods I've seen)

And what do we do in the post-2ghz world? Have heatpipes coming out of our cases like a Chevy hotrod?

Re:He he he

[morcheeba]

>an IBM 3033--although I believe that the Crays
>used some funky proprietary coolant (it was
>pink!).

The cray-1 didn't even bother with heatsinks... the liquid flowed right over the chips!

How to burn Athlon on TechTV

[lowdozage]

I remember when Patrick Norton [techtv.com] who co-host the "The ScreenSavers [techtv.com]" on TechTV [techtv.com] forgot to install the heatsink for UGAM 3.0 [techtv.com].

Article link below

The Dish: The UGM Incident [techtv.com]

"Windows - A thirty-two bit extension and GUI shell to a sixteen bit patch
to an eight bit operating system originally coded for a four bit microprocessor
and sold by a two-bit company that can't stand one bit of competition." (Anonymous USEnet post)

SMP DOA

[xanadu-xtroot.com]

I had an older SMP box (dual MMX-233's). The procs I found shipped with super cheap-o fans. They both went dead in a few weeks after ordering (only the CPU's themselves were covered by the warrenty...). I hadn't noticed at first. I started wondering why KDE (really, the OS in general) was starting to run VERY slow.
I hit every newsboard I could find looking for suggestions. Every suggestion was a flop. One day, I cracked open the case (I forget why exactly) and had a found esentially a microwave oven inside the box. WTF?!? I thought. I quick scan of everything showed me the 2 fans just sitting there jittering (not spinning). DOH!

(No, I don't don't work for these guys)
3d-cool.com [3dcool.com] has a great selection of cooling things for just about anything. I've since ordered a ton of stuff from them. Fast and reliable, they are. I ordered a couple of the super-duty fans for the older slot-CPUs and the thing ran great! A bit loud but...

The SMP box is now collecting dust (but I know it's 100% ready for mnore when I need it)since I found a Super-Worth box for real damn cheap at an EggHead Auction [egghead.com].

Athlon fan failure OK

[Beckman]

I had the fan fail several times on a 1.2 GHz Athlon, but didn't suffer any damage. Apparently AMD design engieers considere the heatsink, but not the fan, as an integrated part of the CPU.

Re:fire?

[baptiste]

i had a quantum fireball burst into flames before

Back before we had a real fileserver at my old job, we had a home built box - Dual Pent II 300 with Tyan mobo hooked to a tower of 8 of the original 9GB Seagate Cheetahs - talk about HEAT! That tower pumped out so much heat we didn't worry about hte HVAC in the winter!

Well, one day we start getting hammered with calls from folks - file server is down. We walk into the server room and the first words out of my mouth: "What's burning?"

TUrns out it was the server. We powered it down, pulled it apart - the power supply cable had overheated and burned (yes BURNED) from the mobo socket about 6" up the wire. OooooK. Talk about a head scratcher - we had NO idea WHY the system had failed, er, burned. SO we start poking around (literally) and notice - one of the heatsinks had come off one of the CPUs ever so slightly, had overheated, and had drawn excessive current (though why teh PS didn't pop a fuse, shut down, etc is still a mystery) WE reattached the heatsink, replaced the power supply - system came right back up. Unreal. I know for a fact that the CPUs are still running systems today - amazing.

VIA C3 800MHz (Cyrix)

[Herstel]

They say it can be frelly run with no fun attached. See low heat dissipation thanks to 0.13 and 0.15 micron processes [via.com.tw]

AMD Athlon 900MHz

[ryanw]

When I installed my AMD Athlon 900MHz several months ago my fan fell of for a few seconds. I went to grab my fan and my finger rubbed up against my processor for half a second as I reached to turn off my computer. My finger welted up in seconds leaving a large blister for several weeks. Infact I can STILL see the scar on my left index finger if I look hard enough.

To say the least, I will not be putting my fingers near an atlon processor without a fan on it ever again. I was lucky I didn't fry my processor along with my finger! I figured the thing would be HOT .. but not enough to melt my skin .. OUCH ..