<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">2009/12/3 David L <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:idht4n@gmail.com">idht4n@gmail.com</a>></span><br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 9:08 AM, John Drescher wrote:<br>
<snip><br>
<div class="im">> And also you may not know the fan died quickly enough. At my<br>
> department at work this is the #1 cause of GPU and motherboard deaths<br>
> over the last 5 years.<br>
><br>
<br>
</div>I naively assumed that most modern processors would<br>
detect high temperatures and shut themselves down before<br>
self destructing. This is obviously not the case, but I'm<br>
wondering why not? Are there some processors that<br>
have this feature and some that don't?<br>
<br></blockquote><div>Most modern processors (since the P4) will do this, however:-<br><br>1. It has to be enabled in the bios <br>2. It's not guaranteed. :)<br><br>So long as your heatsink isn't badly crudded up, or way too inadiquate you should be able to survive a fan failure on a cpu without too much incident these days. This may not be the case if you're loading a quad core 100% load at the time of failure, or if you're overclocking and have disabled the thermal protection cutoff, but generally you should be okay.<br>
<br>IIRC it was introduced first on intel gear, I think the P4 had it, whereas the Athlon at the time didn't. (There's a video somewhere of someone playing Quake 3 on a pentium 4, and removing the heatsink. [1])<br>
<br>However, most modern CPUs should have it from both camps. (although your chances of owning an AMD cpu without it are probably slightly higher.)<br><br>It's also worth mentioning that most motherboards feature some independant 'shutdown on fan fail', 'shutdown when temp exceeds x' settings which should also be used, as they'll catch things long before the CPU protection does. The CPU protection really is there just to stop it going bang.<br>
<br>Cheers,<br><br>Ian<br><br>[1] <a href="http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hot-spot,365-6.html">http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hot-spot,365-6.html</a> (From 2001)<br></div></div>