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Pentium 4

appleIImidi said:
I thought Intel had thermal protection in the CPUs starting around the Pentium 4 era. Athlons burned because they had none.
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To a point but on mega TDP chips just a few seconds of power with no heatsink will be an issue even if the CPU throttles down to sleep mode during BIOS boot, nowhere for heat to go. You can say what kind of an idiot powers up a board with the fan connector on but no heatsink attached and I will point out that those early AMD brackets on socket 754/939/AM2 had a tendency for the tabs to break so the heatsink wasn't making contact in tower cases unless you were lucky and the heatsink compound was like glue. I had that happen to me once and the machine just shut down a couple seconds after turning it on.

I was looking at an old AMD motherboard and there is a temp sensor sticking out of the board in the socket (motherboard BIOS sensor) while Intel had one built into the CPU die.
 
I had that happen. Heat sink popped right off, and that was the end of my AMD. I was laying on the bed watching TV when it happened and the computer made a very odd sound.
 
After the incident I started buying nothing but those, so I have a goodly number if anyone really needs one.
 
Unknown_K said:
An Athlon 1400 is 72W TDP so without a heatsink of some kind to soak up the heat it will burn.

Now an i9-1400KS has a base TDP 150W up to 320W depending on the profile. Even with temp monitoring what would happen if you ran that with no heatsink at all (you can just plug a fan into the cpu fan power so there is a load for the BIOS)
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You probably meant I9-14900KS. Then answer is there is thermal protection and it will simply shut down. Same with the AMD Ryzen chips.
 
appleIImidi said:
I thought Intel had thermal protection in the CPUs starting around the Pentium 4 era. Athlons burned because they had none.
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Intel introduced thermal protection in the PIII era. I'm not sure about the slot CPUs, but later PGA370 Celerons and PIIIs had thermal protection.

AMD didn't have thermal protection until the Athlon 64 in 2003.
 
I thought Intel had thermal protection in the CPUs starting around the Pentium 4 era. Athlons burned because they had none.
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The P4 introduced Thermal Throttling, not Thermal Protection. The latter was part of the PIII already.
 
There were different levels of thermal throttling, the Pentium III and the early Willamette Pentium 4s used the most basic, just flooding the pipeline with NOPs to reduce the amount of work the CPU could perform and lower temperatures. It wasn't until the Northwood Pentium 4 and the Pentium M in 2005 did more advanced throttling become available. And it still wasn't until the Prescott that the Pentium 4 got streamlined clock ramping support that didn't require weird vendor specific drivers or faffing about with extraneous utilities.

Thermal protection existed way back in the Pentium era, with a thermal diode under the CPU socket, and was the only thermal protection available on AMD CPUs until the Athlon 64. It wasn't very good, and it was almost always disabled by default, you had to manually enter a warning and/or shutdown temperature in the BIOS, or the motherboard would happily run a CPU until it fried.
 
I wonder has anyone tried to make a bimetal circuit breaker for CPU thermal protection.
 
Zare said:
I wonder has anyone tried to make a bimetal circuit breaker for CPU thermal protection.
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Can't answer to that. But my AMD 9-7950 runs at 95c which is considered normal for that unit. When running the Cinebench 2023/24 it (the CPU) drops out at @ 107c. The cause leaves some wondering including me. I'm in the process of reseating the CPU with some new superduper silicon/metal concoction in an effort to alleviate the issue. Note that no other stress test or benchmark causes this problem and high end gaming is never an issue. I'm not alone with this problem concerning this particular chip. I currently use the Noctua NH-D15 which has been on the top of the hill for a long while. However, there have been great advances in liquid cooling and I may have to rethink all that. Not a new comer to liquid cooling as I used to use it on a 990 mobo with a Pile Driver chip. Nowadays, cooling is a major issue.
 
I won't say I like that, but I like the fact there will be something to think about in the next upgrade.
All my computers up to 2015 have been stock cooled, for i7 I was advised by a friend to get aftermarket cooling with the purchase. Thermaltake which is inexpensive and quiet. Kept my i7 on 40c, keeping the Xeon upgrade on 40c too.

At least there will be a problem to solve with the next configuration.
 
hunterjwizzard said:
Come on guys, liquid helium cooling. Anything less and you're just wasting your time.
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While I have access to a helium cold finger, you run into some pretty serious issues with them. Stuff like the air freezing around them. And the actual thermal removal wattage is pretty low; the one at $dayjob is rated 18W for 4 kelvin temperature, although we've only gotten it down to 10 kelvin with our leaky vacuum chamber. Getting above 100W is going to be expensive.

There was an experiment years ago taking a Prescott core to 5GHz with liquid nitrogen, much easier to work with.
 
Liquid H2 will get you to between 14 and 20 kelvin; those are the melting and boiling points of H2 at one atmosphere. Solid at liquid He temperatures, but He superfluid is notoriously difficult to work with ....


:) if that's needed......
 
Not exactly a high-end example, but I almost melted a Via C3 Mini-ITX machine running it without a fan. In my defense, well... the Mini-ITX boards in question have soldered-down CPUs and permanently affixed heatsinks; the fan was *absent* when I opened up the off-brand Thin Client the ITX board came in, so I foolishly assumed it was a low-power EDEN variant that could run fanless. Started setting the thing up as a pure DOS machine, but found it was crashing constantly. Eventually put two and two together and pirated a small fan out of the junk pile that miraculously had a matching screw pattern to what the heat sink needed.

Was worried I cooked the thing but it apparently did survive unscathed. Maybe it would have died if I'd walked away from it for too long.
 
They are quite reliable, with a fan of course. I used to work in a company that sold hundreds of 2U rack unit boxes based on C3 as PBX or firewall-router.
From that company I got a 1U rack mini ITX case with a PSU that didn't mind running without a fan, the case wasn't big enough for C3 but it was good for fanless Atom board I just got for myself. Loaded it with a pair of WD green drives, and ran a totally silent ZFS server for home. Worked nicely for a couple of years until a power surge blew through it. It smashed the PSU, board, and one drive. That was in ~ 2010, the ZFS pool is thankfully still alive. It's now in my main PC behind a far far better PSU.
 
Making me remember so much hardware I wish I still had. Upgradable ITX and other tiny systems... how I miss them.
 
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