Toms Hardware Heat Emergencies

[wfbberzerker]

I know the video has been posted many times (about the heatsinks coming off, and athlons melting)
but i was reading it today, and one thing struck me funny. it was their logic behind this test. while its possible for a fan to fail on a processor, this is what they said about the heatsinks...

<< Those large heat sinks have one big problem however. They are often extremely heavy as well. If the mounting mechanism for those devices is not very sturdy, the heavy heat sink can still fall off because the mounting mechanism breaks off. >>

while it doesnt sound very biased, you can tell after reading the whole review that they are kind of pointing towards the athlon. but, have you ever put a heatsink on an athlon? theres really only two ways the cpu could become busted (unless the hsf isnt powerful enough) you either a)push down to hard when putting on the heatsink, or b)you have one of the screw heatsinks that use the 4 holes around the socket, and the "extremely heavy" heatsink pulls on the screws, causing the pcb to crack and the socket and heatsink to fall off. but simply falling off because its too heavy? i had one hell of a time putting on my heatsink, and it only uses 1 of the 3 grabby deals on each side of the socket. as stated before, i think the better test would be if a fan failed... as the thermal probe on the palomino athlons would work:

<< The thermal diode of Palomino is unable to react quickly enough. Only 1 degree/s is what the thermal diode is able to handle. That might be good enough for failing fans. >>

 

[Rankor]

Well weight might play a role.

His reasoning isn't too out of this world.

Now I do find some merit in his review about this. The tension that the mounting clip is high w/c could place extreme stress on the core. This is alleviated by the use of the 4 rubber pads on the Amd chips. But that stress is still being placed on the plastic tabs on the socket itself that holds both the chip and hsf in place. If those break it's game over. It doesn't sound too far-fetched. It can happen. The weight of the hsf will then play a role considering its vertical orientation to a flat horizontal surface. "Falling-off" was the wrong term. Breaking off would have be better.