A question to you all experts about stopping a CPU fan.

[Seero]

Is there a way to cause BSOD or shutdown by stopping the CPU fan or low speed?

I ask because I have just went into WC with newbie kit, H50. I always wonder what would happen if the pump failed. I just realized that the pump is connected to the CPU fan connector and its speed is read in bios. Shall pump fail, the reading of the speed of CPU fan (which is actually the pump) will be 0 or some low number. When this happens, i will like a bsod or something to prevent physical damage due to overheat.

Is there any gurus who can teach me a thing or 2 on this matter? Any knowledge is greatly appreciated.

 

[Zap]

Depends on what CPU you have and your BIOS settings. For instance, recent Intel CPUs with all the defaults in BIOS (which enables protections and throttling) will just go into limp mode (thermal throttling). All that you will notice is that the system is really slow.

 

[Syzygies]

My ASUS P8P67 Pro motherboard has "Intel Adaptive Thermal Monitor, Enables the overheated CPU to throttle its clock speed to cool down", and "CPU Fan Speed Low Limit [600 RPM], This item appears only when you enable the CPU Q-Fan Control feature and allows you to disable or set the CPU fan warning speed." I don't have a speaker to hear the warning, and the motherboard won't stop the processor on a fan warning alone. YMMV.

My 2600K is fine with a hefty tower cooler, fans off, unless it's at load. At load, with a pump failure, my guess is that you'll start throttling, and not do much damage if you catch it soon. If you're gaming, rather than leaving unattended parallel computations, you'll notice.

So just make sure you've done what you can with your BIOS. Read every option, all motherboards are different.

 

[llee]

I had a socket 478 motherboard that wouldn't boot up to the OS unless it detected a CPU fan running at an adequate speed. I'm not sure about current-gen boards however.

 

[Blain]

Is there a way to cause BSOD or shutdown by stopping the CPU fan or low speed?

I ask because I have just went into WC with newbie kit, H50. I always wonder what would happen if the pump failed. I just realized that the pump is connected to the CPU fan connector and its speed is read in bios. Shall pump fail, the reading of the speed of CPU fan (which is actually the pump) will be 0 or some low number. When this happens, i will like a bsod or something to prevent physical damage due to overheat.

Is there any gurus who can teach me a thing or 2 on this matter? Any knowledge is greatly appreciated.

Set your BIOS properly and you'll have no meltdowns.

 

[bmaverick]

A few years back, Corsair sold a WCing unit called the HydroCool 200EX. When the CPU temps got too high or the cooler failed, it took the computer to shut-down mode. It was the first of it's kind to do this without using the BIOS of the computer. Thus, it would work on all computers in principle.

All you would need is to have a thermal sensor that took a "live" reading. If the read got to a threshold you had set, the system could be set to shut-down, stand-by, etc.

 

[Ben90]

You are not going to break a modern processor by overheating.

 

[WildW]

You are not going to break a modern processor by overheating.

The only time you could was about 10 years ago now . . . ahh, memories. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y39D4529FM4

 

[QuantumPion]

Depends on what CPU you have and your BIOS settings. For instance, recent Intel CPUs with all the defaults in BIOS (which enables protections and throttling) will just go into limp mode (thermal throttling). All that you will notice is that the system is really slow.

A few months ago I was playing a game of Civ4 when I noticed everything seemed to be going really slow. Next turns were taking unusually long to finish and the frame rate was all choppy, which is odd for an old game. It turned out the power plug for my fan controller for my radiator fans fell off, and my cpu and gpu were being cooled by only natural convection through the radiator. It took about an hour to heat up to the point of thermal throttling. The radiator and water tubing was scorching hot to the touch, probably >150+ deg. F. Luckily, no harm done. D:

 

[Zap]

A few months ago I was playing a game of Civ4 when I noticed everything seemed to be going really slow. Next turns were taking unusually long to finish and the frame rate was all choppy, which is odd for an old game. It turned out the power plug for my fan controller for my radiator fans fell off, and my cpu and gpu were being cooled by only natural convection through the radiator. It took about an hour to heat up to the point of thermal throttling. The radiator and water tubing was scorching hot to the touch, probably >150+ deg. F. Luckily, no harm done. D:

Something similar happened with my wife's previous rig. It was a Core i5 750 @4GHz and GTX 285 in one loop with a Black Ice Pro 240 rad (hardly that great). I had just replaced one of the fans that was grinding (my fault for buying cheap Yate Loons instead of good Yate Loons). I, er, forgot to plug in the fans. D: I was totally expecting it to be quieter because of the fan swap, so I didn't think anything of it making NO sound, since my rig (in the same room) makes more noise anyways. Well, she played WoW for quite a while with no problem, then she played Borderlands. I don't know if it lagged for her (she didn't say) but it locked after around a whole hour. I'm guessing it locked from the graphics card overheating. The rad was burning hot! I had already hit reset, so I just plugged in the fans and then let it idle to cool it off. Took about a minute for the rad to cool down significantly. Let it idle for another couple minutes and then it was good to go!

 

[Seero]

Thank you everyone for the info. It isn't the rad fan that i am worrying about, but the bump within the system. Shall it fail, there are nothing to radiate heat, and liquid won't be bumped towards the rad. Shall I am on something like prime95 during this, throttling may not be quick enough to throttle and even at throttling speed heat is still being added as heat will be more or less trapped within the CPU block. Once liquid vaporized(when the liquid within the block starts to boil), there are nothing to move heat, which may be too late. However, if the system can shutdown or BSoD at the time when the pump fails, there are enough time to cease the source of heat before heat turns into a problem.

I'm currently on P8p67 + 2600K. I need to make sure cooling is sufficient and failsafe is in place before I start playing with the multipliers.

Thanks again. More opinions, advises are still appreciated.

 

[Zap]

Your CPU will thermal throttle before water starts to boil (100ºC). If it fails to do so (whether due to BIOS settings or whatever) then it will lock up by then.

The other thing is that the water/coolant will never get as hot as what you measure the CPU core to be, so there is pretty much zero chance of an overheating processor boiling the liquid in your cooling loop.

For some reason this thread just made me think of Loosley. :hmm: