Intel just impressed the heck out of me

T

truffle00

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My brother has an Intel 2.4C or 3.0C in a Shuttle SB61G3. A couple months ago, he began having problems with his machine that sounded heat related. I knew that it was hot in the room and didn't really want to deal with it, so I just told him to take off the cover and let it be. He would still get some odd game crashes, but they were less frequent so he was fine with it.

Yesterday he began complaining again, so I decided to take a closer look. I went into the BIOS to see exactly what the temperatures were, and what do I see? 60 C system, 79 C CPU. That's odd, so I decided to look at the ONE fan in the system (if you guys don't know how Shuttles are designed, there is one fan that is on the heatpipe cooler that serves to draw air into the case, cool the CPU, AND exhaust air...well, there's also the northbridge fan [40 mm] and the GPU fan but those don't do anything) and it's DEAD. Has been for months, and my brother has been doing everything he would normally do on the computer, with NO ACTIVE COOLING IN A TINY LITTLE TOASTER MACHINE. Color me impressed. I mean, I would have been in awe at it's ability to merely not die, but it also functioned well. WOW.
 
It's throttling if it's at that temp, simply to keep itself from exploding or melting, or otherwise fragging itself. Intel's smart-throttling is impressive, and it's cool that the little buggers can keep chugging away at very hot temperatures and not have permanant damage.

Why don't you run out and pick up another fan real quick? :p
 
The processor was probably being automatically throttled.

I remember when tomshardware did that article where they pulled the heatsinks off of chips and recorded what happened. The Athlon XP went up in smoke, the P3 froze but was okay, and the P4 just slowed down a lot, but didn’t even freeze… amazing. Not sure if athlon 64’s have something similar or not.
 
Heh I am going out and getting a fan...now that I know the old one is broken. :)

And GotNoRice, yes, I figured that it was throttling. At the same time, the fact that my brother was still using this as a gaming machine and that it still worked well enough to do that says something good about Intel I think. ;)
 
GotNoRice said:
I remember when tomshardware did that article where they pulled the heatsinks off of chips and recorded what happened. The Athlon XP went up in smoke, the P3 froze but was okay, and the P4 just slowed down a lot, but didn’t even freeze… amazing. Not sure if athlon 64’s have something similar or not.
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well the 64's do have like a setting that where when it gets hotter then normal it slows iteself down (i think its called cool and quiet) but im not shure it would do it enough to still save itself if the heatsink were to be removed liek the P4
 
complex said:
well the 64's do have like a setting that where when it gets hotter then normal it slows iteself down (i think its called cool and quiet) but im not shure it would do it enough to still save itself if the heatsink were to be removed liek the P4
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no you're mistaken. A64s have no throttle at all, they simply shut down if they over heat.

Cool and quiet is simply a down clock and lowered V-core when it detects the computer idling. It does not have an auto throttle function that kicks in if the CPU starts to fry while being used, as i said, they just shut down.
 
Athlon 64's can withstand up to 95C (you dont want it to run at this, and it would never get there without 2.1 vcore and passive cooling), and Pentium 4's are probably also in that range.
 
[Tripod]MajorPayne said:
Huh? Please explain that.

Are you saying you would have to use passive cooling for it to get that hot?
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Hello friend on the internet, lets learn some basic principles of cooling.

When you use a fan on a heatsink, it tends to cool it more efficiently since its transfering the heat from the metal to the air a lot faster. Passive cooling isnt as effective. So with a voltage of 2.11v and say the stock AMD cooler without a fan, you're going to hit some pretty high temperatures since the high voltage will make the cpu hotter than hell, and the lack of a fan wont help much. All that's keeping the CPU from hitting 150C is the crappy chunk of metal on it.
 
robberbaron said:
Athlon 64's can withstand up to 95C (you dont want it to run at this, and it would never get there without 2.1 vcore and passive cooling), and Pentium 4's are probably also in that range.
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90-95C is the standard limit for silicon-based chips.
The P4 throttle kicks in at 85C (although some people claim that the newer CPUs throttle at lower temps aswell).
These temps are all ofcourse the temp of the silicon itself, so if you are measuring the temp on the outside (eg with a diode in the socket or in the heatsink), it will be lower.
But modern P4s and Athlons have a thermal diode in the silicon itself, so that will trigger at about 85C. Not all boards seem to report the temperature correctly though.
 
I had the fan quit on my opterons without knowing it. It hovered around 55 until I noticed it.

I was fairly impressed too, considering the temps my old pal got in the same situation.
 
Scali said:
But modern P4s and Athlons have a thermal diode in the silicon itself, so that will trigger at about 85C. Not all boards seem to report the temperature correctly though.
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It's somtimes the board's bios for A64's, but Clawhammers dont have a working temp diode. They say 39C almost no matter what when you're near stock voltage, and the revC0 actually reported higher temps with less voltage :(
 
robberbaron said:
Hello friend on the internet, lets learn some basic principles of cooling.

When you use a fan on a heatsink, it tends to cool it more efficiently since its transfering the heat from the metal to the air a lot faster. Passive cooling isnt as effective. So with a voltage of 2.11v and say the stock AMD cooler without a fan, you're going to hit some pretty high temperatures since the high voltage will make the cpu hotter than hell, and the lack of a fan wont help much. All that's keeping the CPU from hitting 150C is the crappy chunk of metal on it.
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Yeah, yeah. I know, I just didn't understand if that's what you meant or not.

I know that increasing the surface area of the heatsink increases cooling, but circulating new air to remove heat from that surface area is much more effective. I was just checking to see if you were saying something else.
 
I like the throttle down feature of the P4s very much. It compensates very well for the "idiot factor"... lol :D
 
SirKenin said:
I like the throttle down feature of the P4s very much. It compensates very well for the "idiot factor"... lol :D
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Like that one Pentium 4 or celeron that had the heatsink velcroed to it? That was a really funny thread.
 
robberbaron said:
Like that one Pentium 4 or celeron that had the heatsink velcroed to it? That was a really funny thread.
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lol :D Yeah, something like that works (although I missed that thread. Damn). hah.
 
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