Tue Feb 19 16:34:06 2002

A power cable was preventing the CPU fan from spinning. Last nite, after playing Empire Earth with my roomie for about 4 hours, my system locked. Locked hard. I reboot, it's lock on boot. Lock on Bios, Lock on anything. Got scared thinking my DeathStar IBM finally died ( thanks socrates, you ass, now I'm paranoid about my drive :P ). It was fucking *HOT* in that case. I start nosing around a bit, find the cpu fan not spinning, see the power cable just touching the fan blades. Attempt, I repeat, ATTEMPT to touch the heatsink, burn my finger, which now has a big assed blister on it. I leave it off for about 10 minutes, at that point I'm able to remove the cpu from the mobo. It's still damn hot. I place it on my table in front of a fan for another 5 minutes, place it back in the case, and fire the damn thing up. It works, I'm fucking impressed.

AMD Athlon Classic 1.0 ghz. Heatsink burning hot to the touch, and it still works.

I am lucky.

Tue Feb 19 17:44:48 2002

. Attempt, I repeat, ATTEMPT to touch the heatsink,

Well, *that* was stupid. Now I remember why I'm not a techno-geek and why I leave the repairs up to the warranty personnel. ;)

M.

Tue Feb 19 23:22:20 2002

Tue Feb 19 23:42:36 2002

Wed Feb 20 06:03:28 2002

Well, *that* was stupid. Now I remember why I'm not a techno-geek and why I leave the repairs up to the warranty personnel.  

Well, normally in PC's heat sinks *never* get hot enough to burn.

If it was so hot in the case, why on earth did you touch the heatsink?

To determine the amount of damage, or the chances of damage.

My old celeron 366 ran for a few minutes without any heatsink on it whatsoever. But yeah, you're lucky you didn't fry it. Your hand will heal, CPU's unfortunately, do not.

Yea, I am really lucky there, and to think, this is one of the hottest running chips out there. Gotta say something about the engineering that's in the chip, as far as toughness goes.

Fri Feb 22 16:31:30 2002

I built a computer from parts which did not belong to me. First the motherboard didn't fit in the case (both are ATX yet the standoff holes were like 1/4" off, the cards didn't fit in, wtf?) but now it's held in by the cards and nothing else. Then I broke off one of the little white plastic bits which the cpu heatsink is held on by. Oops. The heatsink is now superglued on. The cpu is at about 60C after 6 hours heavy use which seems to be okay, but I'm really scare it'll fall off. It's a gig p3 so it would fry rather than turn off and the bios has no temperature shutdown. And there's no blanking plates in it, even around the mobo ports and there's wires trailing because I built a digital in for the Live and stuff. Works nice though. I just want to avoid kicking it or anything...