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To: herb will who wrote (39057)	5/11/2001 11:43:50 AM
From: that_crazy_doug	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

<< Are you seriously trying to tell me that cooling fans do not fail? >> I misunderstood what you were saying at first. I thought you were saying it was common for them to come loose and fall off the processor. However, I've never had a cooling fan fail on me before either, so I would still say it's an uncommon event. However, all of the athlon's I've built haven't been around long enough to expect failure with age.

To: herb will who wrote (39057)	5/11/2001 1:30:28 PM
From: Petz	Respond to of 275872

herb, yes, cooling fans do fail, but they give a long "advance warning" by being noisy. Personally, I've experienced two noisy fans, one on a five year old 486 which I donated away, the other fixed itself when the PC was turned back to its normal vertical position. And nearly all motherboards blast the speaker if the CPU temp gets above 70 as a default, which is 25 deg short of the damage point. I don't understand why the BIOS's don't turn the voltage down or even turn the machine off at some temperature. That would be almost as good as an internal circuit in the CPU. It would probably require a background task in Windows, since AMD doesn't use interrupts to the BIOS to correct CPU defects the way Intel does. When I bought my 1.33 Athlon and Iwill KA-266, the CPU and fan came already mounted. It's the cheapest Coolermaster, worth $9, but I've never seen anything over 50 degC, which is 45 below the damage point. Petz

To: herb will who wrote (39057)	5/11/2001 3:04:14 PM
From: Joe NYC	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 275872

Herb, Are you seriously trying to tell me that cooling fans do not fail? They do fail, but you can protect from it by using a program like Motherboard Monitor, where you can set up boundry conditions, and action taken (such as shutdown). If the fan dies, It doesn't immediately mean a dead chip, since the heatsink can absorb and radiate some heat away for some time. When you have an immediate problem is when the heatsink is not attached at all, or when the heatsink is improperly attached, and heat doesn't get transfered. I am speaking from personal experience of dealing with a fair number of Athlons by now, frying one. I am not quite sure if P4 or P3 do not have the same problem, that is if you can fry them by running them without heatsink. I would be surprised if this was the case. Let's take P4. If the thermal management kicks in and runs at 1/2 of the speed, it still generates way more heat than the chip even with the heat spreader can radiate. I don't seem to recall if there was a complete halt of the chip implemented in P4 thermal management. The reason you don't hear much about P4 or P3s being fired is because so few people build their own machines with Intel processors. Prior to the price drop, the only people who ended up with Intel chips were customers of Dell, Gateway, E-machines etc. I will have to check the BBSs, but prior to the price drop, there was basically zero interest in Intel chips on part of DIY crowd. Joe