When thermal throttling fails, expect smoke Gory pic insideBy Charlie Demerjian: Sunday 09 April 2006, 06:53 WHAT HAPPENS WHEN thermal throttling does not kick in on a high wattage modern CPU under load? Well, the short answer is bad things, smoke, and a lot of cash wasted. On the up side, it tends to produce sympathy pains, grimaces and lots of cool pics if it is not your rig. Want to know more? Take it away [name removed to protect the guilty]. µI recently experimented with WaterCooling on a Development 840 System I had on the bench, all was fine until one day when I was transfering some data between hard drives while the system was unattended , the Water Pump failed, no biggie, the system would heat up to a point and shut itself down , Right.. ??Wrong.. , I stepped back into the room and noticed a slight smell of burning, nothing too alarming until I dialed up Probe on the desktop and noticed the Temp was at 96 Degrees celcius, and rising.., btw this system would sit comfortably around 35 degreee when not under laoad, realising something had gone drastically wrong, I pulled the plug..I let the system cool, thru on a HeatPipe Cooler, and it kicked back into life ..., Phew... I thought.., The system seemed fine, but it was running way hotter than it normally did on air, so I puuled it down to check out if there was some issue with the Cooler installation.., weel imagine my shock and horror when I tried lifting the CPU out of the Socket and realised that it was a bit tougher than it should have been, Why, because the Bloody thing had litterly welded itself to the farking pins..., I kid you not.., of course onremoving the CPU, I destroyed it and the Motherboard... Argghhhhhh.Now Intel have basically told me to go jump , ASUS are basically telling me to have relations with myself , and I am out of pocket arounf $1200.00 AU.I have attached the picture for your amusement..Why the system failed to shut down is still a mystery, or how it even got yo that temp while not under load, the motherboard was an ASUS P5WD2-Premium, with all of the CPU thermal control on except speed step.., I have no -idea who to point the finger out , but I know one thing, the so called Thermal Protection failed miserably on this occasion, and I am ready to roll some heads.. There is no way a modern CPU should self destruct because of cooling failure, I have had PIV systems that have popped the CPU cooler wire in transit, the systems would just shut themselves down at a certainn temp, no harm done..., WTF failed here is anyones guess, but evryine is washing their hands of it ..The Intel Represenatation here in Australia is a Joke, .. actually there isn't any , it took over a month of some monkey in India repeating that the issue had been logged and escalated.. ??, mind you they asked for the photo's 5 times.. IDIOTS.., well now its time to show the world what a joke Intels so called Thermal Protection actually Looks Like. Enjoy
