Several Random Questions

[Agentbolt]

Got a few questions that have been bouncing around in my head lately, some are a little less important though 🙂

#1. I'm using the stock HSF from AMD with my 2500+ Barton, and Artic Silver Ceramique thermal paste. With the VCore at 1.75 volts, my temps range from 43-47 C idle to 48-54C under load (depends on the ambient temperature, with no AC here it could be 70 or 90 in my room at any given time). Overclocking isn't important enough to me to bother buying a fancy new HSF, I'm sticking with the stock one. Anyone got any ideas (based on personal experience, plenty of people here seem to OC with the stock HSF) how much further I could crank up the VCore to overclock it further without the temperatures going above 60? If the VCore went up to 1.9 or so, would the chip burn out in like a day or two?

#2. If a single pin broke off the CPU, would the computer still work? Would the performance go down, or would it simply be unstable, or just not work at all?

#3. Why did Mandrake 10.0 erase my WinXP boot sector when I installed it normally onto its own partition? Friggin' Linux.... >:0 (rhetorical question)

#4. How much longer is an Athlon 3200+ with 512 MB of RAM and a 9800SE video card going to be a viable computer? Assuming the RAM possibly gets added to later and the 9800SE gets softmodded someday and I just deal with the artifacts? Will it be obsolete in a year, you think? Two?

#5. Is it safe to mention casually that Lindsay Lohan is really hot yet? She turned legal a few days ago.

#6. Settle a bet: If you threw a lit firecracker (say a small M one, like an M60) into the case of a computer and quickly closed it, would it ruin everything in there? I say it would, I mean, it's a freakin' explosive, but my friend claims the concusive force from a small firecracker that can barely blow up a small toy soldier isn't going to be enough to break a HDD or do more than knock the HSF off the CPU. She said it MIGHT wreck an add-on card like a video card, but that the guts of the computer would survive. Everyone tell me how much of an idiot she is

 

[So]

#1 If you're overclocking you're going to need a new HSF...those temps are a bit high as it is.
#2 broken pin == dead CPU, end of story.
#3 'nuff said
#4 Define obsolete...

• if you mean can't play the newest games, a good video card + 1 gig of ram will keep you in the running for another 12 - 18 months. The 9800 will be tenuous at best for Doom3. The 512 ram is already too little for a new system.

• if you mean incompatible with the newest video & pci cards, well pci-e is coming down the pike, so 18 months

• if you mean for any use other than gaming? 5 years.

#5 Your call
#6 100% definitely ruin the computer if the case is closed, 99.9% if the case is open. From your #2 question it seems that you have no idea how fragile this stuff really is.

 

[Agentbolt]

Thanks man. Probably took a few of my questions a wee bit too seriously, I was just being facetious about blowing up computers or breaking off pins on the CPU.

I know I need another 512 of RAM, that's why I went with one 512 stick instead of two 256's running in dual channel. The NF7 only has 3 RAM slots, tragically. I suppose you're right though, 512 doesn't really cut it anymore.

Thanks for the reply concerning obsolesence, that was the one I was really curious about. If a 6800 Ultra and another 512 of RAM will run next year's games with some decent visuals, that's better news than I expected.

-Kyle

 

[Zepper]

Actually it depends on which pin you break - some are duplicate grounds which may not be missed and at least a few aren't connected to anything...
.bh.

 

[daveshel]

#3 You overwrote the boot sector with LILO. It should have given you the opportunity to incorporate the existing Windows boot information and give you a boot menu. If your distro does not offer this, you should have the option to start Linux from a floppy - this is the appropriate option for minimal intrusion into the Windows environment while maintaining the ability to boot to Linux ocasionally. If you callot get into Windows now, you can use the fixboot option in the recovery console to rewrite the boot sector, but then you will be unable to boot to Linux.

 

[So]

Originally posted by: Zepper
Actually it depends on which pin you break - some are duplicate grounds which may not be missed and at least a few aren't connected to anything...
.bh.

True, but I figured it was better to generalize, better off telling people they can't break any pins, rather than risking them thinking they can break some. After all, most people wouldn't know why a data pin was more important.

 

[Gioron]

I've actually heard reports of working CPUs that have lost a pin. The trick is to stick part of a paper clip into the socket (note: the _socket_, not the CPU, don't attempt to reattach the pin or replace the pin on the CPU) and use that instead of the missing pin. Evidently its a pain to get working right, and I'd hate to see the paper clip accidently bridge two contacts, but its still possible. Use this tip only if you're desprate.

Also note that if you forget to remove this paper clip when upgrading your CPU, you might end up with _2_ CPUs that are missing a pin....

 

[DeeKnow]

Originally posted by: Agentbolt

#6. Settle a bet: If you threw a lit firecracker (say a small M one, like an M60) into the case of a computer and quickly closed it, would it ruin everything in there? I say it would, I mean, it's a freakin' explosive, but my friend claims the concusive force from a small firecracker that can barely blow up a small toy soldier isn't going to be enough to break a HDD or do more than knock the HSF off the CPU. She said it MIGHT wreck an add-on card like a video card, but that the guts of the computer would survive. Everyone tell me how much of an idiot she is

that one's simple... just try it!

 

[Agentbolt]

See, this is more what I had been wondering about. I wasn't sure if breaking off a pin automatically meant dead CPU, I'm just not sure about the architecture of one and hadn't known if they're all connected to something vital. Maybe breaking one off would precipitate a loss of L2 or L3 cache, giving you a massive performance hit but not making the chip dead. I am NOT advocating that people go off and snap pins off their CPUs until they don't work, So, so there's no need to tell me there'll be a dead CPU automatically (when there won't neccessarily be) to "protect" anyone's stuff, and certainly no reason to indicate that my thinking it's possible the CPU would still work means I don't understand the fragility of components.

Thanks Daveshel, I figured it was something like that. I've installed Linux a few times and knew basically what I was doing, and that one time it overwrote the boot sector. I tried doing Bootfix but the entire boot area got corrupted when I did it, and I couldn't get rid of the corrupted boot entry so it never tried to open the new, good boot sector I'd made. My own fault, obviously.

Thanks for the tips about how to fix a CPU that the pin ever HAS broken off of, Gioron, I had no idea something that simple would work. The material that a paper clip is made out of is probably less conductive than the copper pins a CPU usually has, I wonder if performance would suffer?

As for sticking a firecracker in a computer case, I'm curious about that myself, I wish I had a PC I was willing to sacrifice to the gods of curiousity. A firecracker like that is more of a noisemaker than a high explosive, so it's not neccessarily a given that it will wreck the guts of a computer, according to my friend. I almost want to get her over here so she can explain her own side of the story, but I guess I'll just have to contiue to explain both sides for her 🙂 A firecracker is only capable of hurting exposed circuits, it would NOT be powerful enough to actually bend and rip metal, so the CPU would be protected by the HSF, it wouldn't be powerful enough to break the board of an add-on card, destroy the RAM, or certainly hurt the HDD or wiring. It could fry an unlucky exposed circuit that its right next to, but she thinks it'd only be powerful enough to destroy the circuits in a 2 inch radius around it. She thinks you guys are possibly thinking of grenades instead of firecrackers, and insists they make a lot of noise and an EXTREMELY localized concussive explosion, and that's it.

Also, no one has called me a sick pedophile for mentioning I have a crush on Lindsay Lohan yet! Personally I think her coming of age was even more important than the Olsen Twins', especially because she's off making more movies and therefore earning more money while the Olsen Twins have both checked into rehab for being skeletons.

 

[Demon-Xanth]

#1: Why bother?
#2: Over half of the pins on a CPU are for power and ground. There's a fairly good chance it'll be okay, but there's a not bad chance that it's FUBAR.
#3: Windows does the same, it's a bug that Mandrake's acknowledged, and I believe addressed. MS doesn't give a rats arse when Windows does it.
#4: A good long time depending on what you're doing with it.
#5: Sure.
#6: If it damages everything, it'd be due to a cascading fault (ie: 12V line shorts to a 5V line...). A firecracker can't damage a glass bottle (I tried this one), I doubt it could do something inside of a case. A case is hardly a sealed enclosure. An M-80 on the other hand, that's a troubleshooting procedure.

M-80 troubleshooting procedure:
Toss a lit M-80 into the case.
Close it up.
Wait for the boom.
Replace anything that looks broken.

Edit:
I didn't get much of a chance to play with fireworks when I was a kid (just fire itself). So i'm not sure what the size of an M-60 is. Just the standard firecrackers and M-100's.