OT...did you know (PC oriented)

[632 Regal]

that if you try to put a better cpu fan on your pc for safety and it starts by itself it only takes 3 seconds to fry the cpu? AMD 2000 XP rests in peice (s) it seems that it started itself upon removing the fan connection and as soon as I heard fan noise I pulled the plug...too late. Smells like a crack house, or a bad electronics shop at least. Now I'm on my sons pc and its like borrowing the neighbors car, no bookmarks, no shortcuts, not enough upgrades but hey, Im here! Told you it has been a bad week.
Jeff

[andyman32]

LOL... jeff, if you pull the CPU fan out it won't make the board start. What might have happened is that you pressed down on the mainboard and some circuits on the back contacted with the case. THAT can cause a short that starts up the CPU.

And, in either case, whether or not a CPU fan is connected makes no difference. The only thing that can happen is that the chip can overheat, but it will only overheat enough to burn the chip if it's under a high processor load (like playing a 3D video game). Most modern mainboards also automatically shut down if they detect a critical operating temperature. I have an AMD Athlon 3200+ and it will run fine for hours with no CPU fan attached in an ambient temperature of about 70 degrees F, as long as I use it for normal apps - Word, Excel, email, web.

Could anything else have changed?

If the mainboard did contact the case, THAT could lead to very bad things...

Sorry for the bad luck. :-\

-Andy

[winfred]

sorta what i was thinking, if it made that much heat that fast that lil sink and fan wouldn't have a chance

LOL... jeff, if you pull the CPU fan out it won't make the board start. What might have happened is that you pressed down on the mainboard and some circuits on the back contacted with the case. THAT can cause a short that starts up the CPU.

And, in either case, whether or not a CPU fan is connected makes no difference. The only thing that can happen is that the chip can overheat, but it will only overheat enough to burn the chip if it's under a high processor load (like playing a 3D video game). Most modern mainboards also automatically shut down if they detect a critical operating temperature. I have an AMD Athlon 3200+ and it will run fine for hours with no CPU fan attached in an ambient temperature of about 70 degrees F, as long as I use it for normal apps - Word, Excel, email, web.

Could anything else have changed?

If the mainboard did contact the case, THAT could lead to very bad things...

Sorry for the bad luck. :-\

-Andy

[Unregistered]

what a load of rubbish...an amd 3gig processor will fry itself within seconds without a heatsink unit

although i do agree it should shutdown if it gets too hot before it cooks. But it has nothing to do with what apps u are running, although this will increase temp, it already runs too hot upon switch on.

Assuming you are meaning a fan/heatsink combined as they usually are these days, so taking it off removes the heatsink as well

[632 Regal]

you guys arent helping my bad attitude at all, 10 beers and im hoping it was just the cpu.

Something got real hot and the cpu has a burnt brown section just above the heat sink part (the processor) the thing was dead, pulled the fan and then pulled the wires. walked into the kitchen and heard fan so I dove and pulled the plug...too late. No pushing on anything.

Anyways ordered a new processor, they only cost 37 bucks now, far from 250+ just hope the MB is okay. I do not look forward to replacing the vidio card now, I think I lost a bit of confidence lately.

I dont know what I would do if I actually had anything go wrong with the bimmer, maybe I should sell it now since the only issues I had in a year was thrust arms and tires. I am blessed in a way I guess.

Thanks for all the upbeat help guys!

Maybe the people close to Michiscam can get together for a track day? Lapeer dragway would be cool.

blah blah blah

[632 Regal]

was saying I removed old noisey fan and heat sink to replace with new heatsink and fan... how it restarted on its own is beyond me, i pulled the fan/sink before the connection.

[Unregistered]

perhaps you should leave fiddling with it to the professionals....

[winfred]

come on down to loserana for visit, we can go out and shoot something, or you could beat the crap outta a stripped car at the yard with a sledge, you'll feel better

Thanks for all the upbeat help guys!blah blah blah

[winfred]

that's why god gave man oposable thumbs, so he could fiddle all by himself

perhaps you should leave fiddling with it to the professionals....

[andyman32]

what a load of rubbish...an amd 3gig processor will fry itself within seconds without a heatsink unit...

Athlon 3200 runs at ~2.2 ghz, not 3. It will run for a long while without a heatsink/fan. It will only overheat if it's under high load for long periods, or if you have it overclocked. I do not have mine overclocked.

Any board made in the last 3-4 years will indeed have a hard shutdown protection for overheating.

And, lastly, it does make a WORLD of difference what your processor load is. When you start programs (ordinary apps), the processor encounters short bursts from the cache, but quickly settles back to 1%-3% capacity (idle). Programs like Word, browsers, etc., reside mostly in memory. I have spreaders on my RAM and 4 case fans (2 in 2 out), so they stay quite cool.

When you run something like an OpenGL 3D game (games built on the Quake3 engine are pretty common), the processor will run at a steady load of 30%-50% capacity, depending on your bus speed and video card.

I know this from empirical evidence. Right after I got this 3200 my computer kept shutting down hard, but only at random intervals of 1 to 3 minutes after I would start playing an OpenGL game. This never happened on my old Athlon 1600. A buddy who had had the exact same problem told me that it was overheating. I already had a stock heatsink and fan on. To test it, I took off the heatsink and fan and ran the comp without any problems for a good long while, as I said, with ordinary apps. When I started the game, it shut down almost immediately (probably operating closer to the critical temp w/o the heatsink). I bought a big fancy Gigabyte vortex heatsink/fan (it even has LIGHTS!!!) with a fan controller, and the thing runs flawlessly under any load.

I even took graphs of the CPU load and operating temp from AIDA. There's an obvious correlation.