Heat Problems With AMD Processors
 

Hey there is a neat story on http://www.tomsharware.com on heat problems with the Athlon ('Thunderbird') and AtlonMP ('Palomino'). If the heat sink become dislodged, the temperature can rush up to almost 300 degC in mere seconds!

The full story is at Tom's Hardware complete with video (really slick too...smoke and cooking CPUs).

Nathan Gifford

Thanks Giff,

Nice to see you here. Please swing through "These Are in People in your Neighborhood" and leave some chicken scratches about yourself.

I meant to send you an e-mail asking you to join up; glad you found this on your own. Welcome aboard!

Here is something you might not find out on your own- AMD fans are actually quieter and more efficient than some of those bigger, badder, must use fans. I have a ThermalTake, and it sounds like a jet turbine.

Of course, the Screen Savers on Tech TV did a review on these fans AFTER I had already bought. Just like AMD came out with the 2100+ AFTER I bought the 1800.

I was cutting edge... for about 18 hrs. It felt goooood!
Keith

For someone who just joined, Nathan Gifford sure racked up 130 posts really really fast. :)

I hear that Pentium 4 chips take much longer to heat up and cause damage than the AMD's. Personally I prefer AMD, but the Pentium 4 does seem to have one advantage at least in this area.

P4 chips (including XEON) are the newest bad boys on the block, altho' tests have shown the speed advantage to be marginal and spotty, depending on the app. Yes, AMD's run hotter. The article at Tom's was a little bit of sensationalism that resulted in better hardware monitoring being built into mobo's. The truth is that even tho' P4's run cooler, they will fail just as fast without active cooling.

On the subject of technology development, AMD is working on a new die size and CPU architecture, called HAMMER, that will be out in the fall of this year. It's supposed to be MUCH faster than the P4. I think the message is that good ol' competition will keep technology development up and costs down. The speed winner dujour will keep hopping around, and what's hot today will be obsolete tomorrow. Perhaps the real consideration for folks that rely on a reliable system to put food on the table will be to go for yesterday's technology(and I literally mean yesterday) at half the price and twice the reliability than the stuff just released.

Software and hardware makers, these days, are under incredibly stiff pressure to release product improvements to stay competetive. As a result, less than optimal(read: reliable) soft/hard ware is being made available to us all....;-(. Can you imagine what it would be like if airplane makers like Boeing did this?