Author: Keith Ian Price
Date: 12:21:54 03/28/02
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The heatsink and fan on today's processors keeps the chip at a certain temperature, cool enough for full-speed operation of the clock. As for running your computer for days and causing the processor to heat up, Tom's Hardware Guide tested XPs (Palomino) for thermal protection by removing the heatsink to see if they will shut down, and instead the temperature of the processor went over 300 degrees Celsius in less than a second and the processor burst into flame. Therefore you can see you needn't wait days for the processor to heat up. This really surpised them, since there is supposed to be built-in protection implemented by the motherboard, and they were using a motherboard which claimed to implement it. In tests later, they found that the circuit cannot respond to changes in temp > 1 degree/second. Not very useful if the heatsink falls off. Pentium 4s' clocks throttle back almost instantly if the heatsink is removed so the processor will not be damaged, but this will not happen if the heat sink is in place, and the processor fan is not broken, and so there should be no slowdown. So you can see that whether you run it for a second or for days, if the heat sink is in place and the fan is running, no problem. If the heatsink falls off, then you better have a Pentium 4. (Pentium IIIs will hang but not burn up.) With XPs, they will immediately execute the HCF assember code (Halt and Catch Fire).
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