> There are numerous stories of machines where the heatsink was not in contact with the CPU for some reason, yet they remained perfectly stable (but slow) for m

> There are numerous stories of machines where the heatsink was not in contact with the CPU for some reason, yet they remained perfectly stable (but slow) for many years. I once had a laptop, which came from the factory with the four screws which hold the heatsink to the CPU missing. It was very slow, and shut down after a few minutes (the reason being thermal shutdown in the BIOS event log helped diagnose the issue). After the four screws were replaced (each screw came in its own large individual cardboard box), it worked fine for many years, BUT after a couple of years (still under warranty), the motherboard failed with a short in the power input. I suspect that all the extra heat from when the CPU was without a working heatsink went to the power supply components through the motherboard ground plane, and cooked them, significantly shortening their useful life.