On Mon, 14 Jan 2002, Steve Elias wrote: > 1 - i just got my wife's toshiba laptop back from toshiba warranty > service. running prime95 for ~6 months on it caused the fan to die, > and then the laptop would overheat & shutdown even without prime95 > running. apparently the heat caused lots of disk badblocks too.
Laptop fans don't seem to be very durable. I have a two year old Dell that has apparently had a broken fan for a long time, and I didn't notice it because the it (either the MB or the Celeron) throttles down automatically but continues to work and nothing I was doing was that CPU sensitive that I would notice the lack of speed. This is actually kind of neat because it leaves the computer still usable (and even at top speed with an external fan blowing in the intake port), but I do wish it would popup a notice that the CPU was being throttled. > 2 - my manager at work here had a thinkpad. he ran prime95 despite my > worry that it was very "tough" on laptops. within a few months his > harddrive failed - possibly due to months of excess heat... :| this > could be considered a classic Dilbertian CLM (career limiting move) on > my part, but no worry since my manager is super-cool. Yes, I do not think most laptops are very durable. Companies know they will usually get a lot less use than a desktop, so they know they only need to get a few months of actual runtime to get them out of the warranty period. I think it has more to do with simply using them 24/7 (or more than a few hours a day on average) than with prime95. > 3 - i also ran the prime95 app for a year or so on an ancient cyrix > p120+ which had a cpu-fan that stopped. after a couple months of > no-cpu-fan, that cpu died completely... Well, I don't think that necessarily has anything to do with prime95 either. My dad had a Cyrix 200, his cpu fan started being noisy and flaking out, I advised him to get a new fan, which he did not, and eventually the system bombed hard. He was not running prime95. > 4 - i bought a 2Ghz P4 recently. despite initial worries that it was > running too hot (70 C) because fan was too slow (2800 rpm), i got > adventurous and clocked the cpu at 2.1 Ghz for a day. weeks later the > machine started acting very badly (motherboard cpu temp alarm caused > shutdown @ 90 C even without prime95 running). so i returned it to > the vendor. they claimed that my overclocking it broke the P4, and > that the top of the cpu was actually burnt/blackened from the heat. > this is counter to my belief that improper fan/heatsink was the cause, > but i can't prove it. also it runs counter to what i've read here & > elsewhere about the thermal-protection built into P4s 1.7Ghz or > faster. they are returning the P4 to intel to see if Intel will > replace it for free, but in the meantime i have to pay for a new cpu! > (i'm picking 1.8Ghz this time.) Thermal protection for P4's is partly a matter of the chip, and partly a matter of the motherboard/chipset. Intel built motherboards have been shown to be very paranoid about throttling the CPU compared to boards built by other vendors (and with non-Intel chipsets). As far as the CPU's own thermal protection, Intel took some heat for the fact that the thermal protection was causing performance problems compared to AMD chips. There was a rather famous test done by Tom's Hardware Guide where they removed the heatsink from test chips while they were running to simulate a catastrophic failure of the heatsink falling off the CPU. The P4 throttled perfectly with a huge performance degradation, but it kept going. So it does seem odd that your chip would have "burned", but perhaps Intel backed off on the thermal diodes in the chip itself because of the performance problems. _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
