Permanant damage to an Athlon T-Bird with no fan for ~20 mins?

[CZroe]

Hmm, I was trying out someone elses CPU in my junk system to make sure it worked (It did, his board was dead). When I swapped my CPU back in the system the CPU fan somehow came unplugged. There is no thermal sensor in the CPU socket (SUPER cheap mobo) and the T-Birds do not have an internal thermal diode (Palominos and up, right?). I booted the system and left it on the XP Welcome screen and tended to other business. When I looked in my room over 20 minutes later, I noticed the screen was black. I knew I had left it on, and even saw the Welcome screen so I investigated. I thought it was off because I couldn't hear the fan so I pushed power. Then it hit me. DAMN! That heatsink was searing hot when I pulled it out earlier while the fan was working, I could only imagine how hot it was then. Sure enough, the system would not turn back on. I cleared the CMOS, connected the fan, tried it again, failed, and let it be fore a while then it booted right up. XP's error reporting wanted to report a few things, so I thought it was having problems immediately after booting but that has since cleared up.

I don't see how it's possible for something to survive being that hot. How do I know it's still OK?

 

[onelin]

Does Prime95 tell you if your CPU has errors doing calculations? I reckon if it got damaged then intensive use (like Prime95) would bring on the issues. Personally I can't see how it would have survived unscathed, but..hey... /shrug.

 

[BentValve]

If it still works then pull the heatsink off altogether and that should make it quit. Then he
has a good excuse to buy a much better performing and cheap 1700+ Tbred .

 

[TROGDORdBURNINATOR]

You CPU is fine. Even old Thunderbirds had enough thermal protection to shut the system down in a case like that. It's only when you pull the heatsink right off that it doesn't have enough time to react. If it didn't shut down, it didn't get close to hot enough to permanently damage the CPU. If you're running prime95 fine, don't worry. It's all good.

 

[react]

Originally posted by: BentValve
If it still works then pull the heatsink off altogether and that should make it quit. Then he
has a good excuse to buy a much better performing and cheap 1700+ Tbred .

Or he can say that he did, sell the chip and get the tbred.