3 ms·

I am by no means an expert, but I was under the impression modern motherboards and CPUs had protections/limits specifically to prevent this from happening (or a

• magicalhippo 3y ago
  Right, back in the days AMD CPUs lacked thermal protection and would die quickly if the heatsink wasn't mounted properly[1]. Intel had thermal protection and would just clock down the CPU. These days there's a lot of protection built in. For example, the voltage regulator ICs they use on the motherboard should all have thermal, over-current, under-voltage and other protection built-in. So yeah I do think it's newsworthy that a modern CPU can burn itself up. I would not expect that, even overclocked. [1]: https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/how-long-would-it-take-an-athlon-to-fry-with-no-heatsink.626904/ https://arstechnica.com/civis/threads/how-long-would-it-take...
• formerly_proven 3y ago
  The investigation in the video shows that on a number AM5 motherboards many of these protections don't work properly to the point of the motherboard creating a literal puddle of molten silicon inside the CPU. In addition the firmware of many AM5 boards is buggy and sets incorrect voltages for the system, for example certain ASUS boards set the SoC voltage way too high (1.4x V instead of 1.0 V). That seems to cause excessive power dissipation in some cases but can also end up triggering what seems to be a latchup (which would almost assuredly kill the CPU anyway, but is not supposed to start a fire).