I remember seeing a test over at Thermalright some time ago. They put one of their heatsinks on a processor/motherboard and put it in a case and then dropped it from the second story(?) of their office. Everything survived except the case if I recall correctly. Just thought I'd toss in another example of how hardy some computer components can be.
BTW, PC Magazine used to do hardware survival tests on laptops a long time ago. I don't know if they still do it or not, but it was pretty amazing what they would do to those machines and yet they still continued to work even after all the abuse.
techfuzz