Almost killed my CPU just now

[joohang]

My Athlon 1 GHz almost died just now. :Q:Q:Q

It ran at 50°C~60°C idle (these are MSI readings, so it could be much hotter than that) because I was cooling it with a Molex quiet HSF.

I got curious about the 3D performance of my new Matrox so I downloaded and ran the 3DMark 2000 demo. In the middle of the demo.. my computer shut off.

It refused to boot after that. The LED lights on the board showed all red. To my surprise, though, I wasn't shocked or anything. I just wanted to make sure that my motherboard and other components were ok and was ready to go out and grab a Duron 900.

So I took the Duron 800 from my server and tried to boot up. It not only POST'd fine, it booted up to Windows 2000 without any trouble.

Then I took the "dead" Athlon to my server and tried it on the Gigabyte board. It worked! The server booted up to Windows 2000 (after a BSOD, but anticipated for changing the CPU) and it's running fine now.

My server is using the AMD retail HSF, so I'm going to use the Duron on my workstation for a while. Phew!

Gotta love these adventures of running quiet PCs.

 

[Rand]

I've had similar experiences with processors before... wouldnt want to lose a 1GHz Athlon.
Try the Athlon back in your workstation again, perhaps after some time it'll be allright in it again... with better cooling that is.

 

[joohang]

I'm too paranoid to run it on my workstation now. I'll leave it on the server with the retail HSF for now and maybe get a Molex HSF with higher rpm.

I can add a chassis fan right beside the CPU. You think that will help it cool better?