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I once watched a brand new K7 burn before my eyes. I had just installed it and wanted to power it up briefly before securing the heat sink and cooler. I had don

I once watched a brand new K7 burn before my eyes. I had just installed it and wanted to power it up briefly before securing the heat sink and cooler. I had done this many times with Intel chips. Well, the AMD took exactly two seconds to go up in smoke and this broke college student was out a couple of hundred dollars.

bradleyland 16y ago
No offense, but that's about the worst thing you can do to a modern processor. The only reason the Intel didn't go up in smoke was because of proper on-die thermal protection. You still should never boot a modern processor without the heat sink in place. The temperature will almost instantly exceed the thermal design limits of the materials. AMD's only poor decision was not to provide good thermal protection in their CPUs. Running the processor without a heat sink was your own poor decision.