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Hardware

Cooling Down Hot Processors 293

Posted by CmdrTaco from the feeling-hot-hot-hot dept.
DonnaMai writes "Face it: the only scorching hot thing you want with a chip is salsa. Any other overheating is potentially counterproductive, and can be downright damaging to the microprocessor -- or other components. This article uncovers potential ways to chill the chips."
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Cooling Down Hot Processors More

Cooling Down Hot Processors

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  • Eh? (Score:4, Funny)

    by American AC in Paris ( 230456 ) * on Tuesday February 08, 2005 @01:48PM (#11608120) Homepage
    Face it: the only scorching hot thing you want with a chip is salsa.

    Because nothing says "fiesta!" quite like third-degree burns on the roof of your mouth...

  • You Insensitive Clod (Score:3, Funny)

    by big-giant-head ( 148077 ) on Tuesday February 08, 2005 @01:48PM (#11608133)
    To maximize my ROI i use my p4 as a hotplate/Pizza Warmer when I'm not surfing the web.
    • I remember using my old Athlon to warm my apartment on cool winter nights...

      On a more serious note, I think that it's impressive that AMD has turned it around in the temperature department while still delivering great performance. The AMD64's [amd.com] kick ass when you want them to, and then scale back to be cool when you aren't running processor-intensive aps. I'm sure Transmeta or someone else thought of doing something like that before, but I think that this is where we'll see it more and mroe often.
      • Do most (Intel) desktop processors use more power when they are being used more? heavily I had thought that they just did X billion cycles per second whether they had actual data to process or not.

        Would I save power by not running BOINC (it's like seti@home)?
        • Heat varies markedly with usage. Different types of proccesing use different sections of chip, so what you're doing can make a difference. 3D games tend to get a chip as hot as it will get. Also stuff like BOINC.

          I thought it interesting that the recent release of details about Sonys Cell said that the chip had 10 temp sensors on board, presumably to shift processing away from areas getting too hot.

        • well,

          the linux kernel (and presumbaly the windows kernels as well) issue the hlt instruction when idle, which allows parts of the chip to power down, significantly reducing power and heat.

          (some/all?) desktop P4s can also scale down clock cycles under software control, but that is significantly coarser grain than the hlt instruction. When it works, the hlt instruction should be sufficient to keep the cpu cool when not doing anything.

          Of course, these recourses don't always work. My P4's fan is currently
    • I think the heat from my monitor makes this (small) room warmer...

      BTW is that sig meant to draw attention to that passage of the bible, or meant to imply that your post it a biblical quote?

  • Bah (Score:5, Funny)

    by ikkonoishi ( 674762 ) on Tuesday February 08, 2005 @01:48PM (#11608136) Journal
    When I was a kid we had to cool our chips by using our little brothers as a heatsink.
    • Damn you ikkonoishi!

      love,
      your fried brother

      p.s. Sister's pregnant again.
    • When I was a kid we had to cool our chips by using our little brothers as a heatsink.

      For those who don't get the reference, Bill Cosby has a story about how he used to bathe in the toilet as a child. But he found that the water was too cold so he'd use his little brother Russell to warm up the water.

      Of course, I could be completely wrong and this might have nothing to do with that bit.

  • cool chips (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Luxifer ( 725957 ) <geek4hire&gmail,com> on Tuesday February 08, 2005 @01:50PM (#11608158)
    What we really need is a spare, low-power, mimimal processor without all the fancy extensions that you can switch to when you're just, say, reading a webpage or email, or such.. you could integrate this right into the motherboard and completely shut down your processor when you're not using it for real stuff. IMHO... maybe an engineer will give me a reason this is unreasonable.

    • Re:cool chips (Score:5, Informative)

      by MC68000 ( 825546 ) <brodskie@NoSpAm.gmail.com> on Tuesday February 08, 2005 @01:54PM (#11608217)
      We already have that. It's called Speedstep and it's on Pentium M processors.
    • That is partly the purpose of the design of the new cell processor, allowing the processor to scale as required. It has a general purpose CPU, plus the actual cell's. You might just get what you're wishing for ;)

    • Re:cool chips (Score:3, Informative)

      by Ironsides ( 739422 )
      It's called the Crusoe Processor by Transmeta [transmeta.com]. And yes, it is an x86 processor.
    • You need a marketing person to tell you why a slow, cool processor is unreasonable!

    • Re:cool chips (Score:5, Interesting)

      by detritus` ( 32392 ) <awitzke AT wesayso DOT org> on Tuesday February 08, 2005 @01:58PM (#11608282) Homepage Journal
      Because configuring a MB for 2 processors is going to be a lot more complicated than the switching frequency model they use now (ie. Athlon XP-M and Pentium M chips). This method is a lot less complex than attempting to use 2 processors, one for high load and one for low load. (imagine trying to determine what's considered high load? after all web browsing actually takes a fairly high CPU while rendering some pages, especially with the more complex XML and (ick) flash pages that are out there). I'm typing this on a Athlon XP-M laptop right now and it actually stays quite cool until the CPU load goes above a certain point and it jumps fromm 533Mhz to 1.74GHz, at which point if its sustained it almost gets uncomfortable for laptop use.

    • Re:cool chips (Score:5, Insightful)

      by doublem ( 118724 ) on Tuesday February 08, 2005 @02:02PM (#11608348) Homepage Journal
      The problem is software bloat.

      If applications were coded as if there were actual restrictions, if speed and efficency were a consideration, then this would be a valid option. 90% of the processing power in a computer would only be used when playing a game.

      Sadly, we live in a world where the OPERATING SYSTEM will soon require a 3D card to even function. (Windows Longhorn)

      The bottom line is, despite significant advances in hardware, the "User Experience" still feels as sluggish and slow as it did in the days of Windows 3.1 on a 386. How much does XP do that the average user needs that Windows 3.1 and Word 2.0 couldn't? Can you IMAGINE how fast Windows 3.1 would be on modern hardware if the drivers existed?
      • That's the OS shell. XP still runs fine headless.

      • Re:cool chips (Score:3, Informative)

        by CausticPuppy ( 82139 )
        Sadly, we live in a world where the OPERATING SYSTEM will soon require a 3D card to even function. (Windows Longhorn)

        And that's not even an original idea from Microsoft.

        OSX 10.3 (Panther) already utilizes 3D acceleration on video cards and treats all windows as textures. That's how the nifty "expose" feature works. The first time I saw that feature it was one of those "why didn't anybody think of this before" moments. I don't even own a mac, yet... but my mini is on its way. :-)

        10.4 (Tiger) will take
      • Bloat is there because it's cheaper to buy a new PC than to buy unbloated software.

      • Re:cool chips (Score:2, Informative)

        by skubeedooo ( 826094 )
        I'm not totally sure of all this, but from memory win 3.1 couldn't:
        • Interface with USB peripherals, and hence the majority of devices which people want/use.
        • Have long filenames
        • Access large HDs
        • Have limited access users without some novell type extension

        And with word 2.0 you couldn't

        • Save docs as html
        • Do a decent grammar check
        • Write for more than an hour without it crashing.
        • Document templates?
        • Write scripts in a decent language where the object model is compatible with other 'office' applications, ie v

      • Re:cool chips (Score:4, Interesting)

        by Dracolytch ( 714699 ) on Tuesday February 08, 2005 @02:54PM (#11608984) Homepage
        Dude, 90% of the processor power IS only used when playing a game. I have my system monitor open, and as I type this on my development computer, I'm at a steady 8 to 11 percent. 5% of that (half my CPU load) is running the flash animation on the top of this page.

        CPUs today are bored 90% of the time. Doing word processing and stuff, your CPU use is probably below 10%. The sluggishness has almost NOTHING to do with CPU speed. The big thing is load times, which is correlated to disk usage. RAM really is virtually unlimited, and the only time I've hit the limitations of my CPU are when I'm doing things like writing programs to breed multimedia files.

        If you're talking about lack of responsiveness, you sound like you don't need a faster processor... it sounds like you need a 1Ghz machine with 256 MB of decent RAM and a 10,000 RPM SATA drive. 512 MB of RAM if you surf with multiple windows and work with spreadsheets at the same time. Swear to god, that'll knock most of your lack of response time to near nothing.

        ~D
      • Sadly, we live in a world where the OPERATING SYSTEM will soon require a 3D card to even function. (Windows Longhorn)

        So what? Ofloading this stuff to a graphical processor is a Good Thing (TM); The CPU has less to do and interface responsiveness can improve.

        The bottom line is, despite significant advances in hardware, the "User Experience" still feels as sluggish and slow as it did in the days of Windows 3.1 on a 386.

        Yes, Windows feels really sluggish. If you don't have much tying yourself to Windows
      • If applications were coded as if there were actual restrictions, if speed and efficency were a consideration, then this would be a valid option.

        I call BS here. For one thing, for "normal users" processor speed does not matter anymore. Any CPU made in the past 2 or 3 years is fine for most everybody. You can look at the web, read email, do office app stuff, play with your digital camera, and it will be fine.

        Now look at your "power user" aka gamer, digital video/pictures, audio, or the like. These apps
    • How does this help me when I'm playing games for 4 hours and my chip is using all it's power?

      You have to design such a system for the peaks, not just lower th entire average temperature of the chip.

    • Re:cool chips (Score:3, Insightful)

      by gl4ss ( 559668 )
      if you want a low powered machine.
      buy one.

      but you'll still need to cool the high powered beast when you need the power, unless you would like to get some nitrous shitter that only could run full blast for 20 secs and then explode.

    • Re:cool chips (Score:3, Informative)

      by AShuvalov ( 6816 )
      I guess that is available, you have nothing to wait.

      The AMD Athlon64 3500 consumes 20W of power on low load and 69W when you stress it. Most of the time it will be pretty cool.

  • Cool it down (Score:2, Insightful)

    by BooRolla ( 824295 )
    The easiest way to keep it cool to not run Intel.
    • Agreed.

      Quite frankly, if a decent heatsink+fan isn't enough to keep your processor from overheating, you really need to get a new processor. You should spend your money on that, not on silly solutions that won't address the root cause of the problem and may or may not even work.

      It's a known fact that one of the easiest ways to completely destroy your machine is to use a watercooler.

  • In my day.... (Score:4, Funny)

    by vought ( 160908 ) on Tuesday February 08, 2005 @01:52PM (#11608189)
    We used to build a little dam around the processor with putty, fill up the reservoir with freeze-spray, and drink margaritas while the whole shebang evaporated noisily.

    No fancy metal heat sinks for us...andd we liked it!

  • Move! (Score:5, Funny)

    by turboflux ( 781551 ) on Tuesday February 08, 2005 @01:52PM (#11608195)
    Best way to cool your processor is to move to Canada. Hands down.
  • a block of frozen CO2 on top of your pc and your problems will be solved.

    Granted, you'll have to have a tank of O2 nearby, wear a mask and have on thick gloves but hey, you can't have everything.

  • Tsssss! (Score:5, Funny)

    by geomon ( 78680 ) on Tuesday February 08, 2005 @01:54PM (#11608219) Homepage Journal
    Ice cubes work well.

    They don't last very long, though.

    Perhaps we should be working on a better ice cube!

    • Re:Tsssss! (Score:3, Funny)

      by athakur999 ( 44340 )
      That's still thinking small. The biggest obstacle to cooling CPUs is that air is a very poor conductor of heat. Since almost all cooling systems used for PCs at some point have to radiate heat into air to cool down, air is the obvious weakness in the system.

      Solution: We all need to grow gills and move under the sea.

  • Razored processor architecture (Score:5, Interesting)

    by Raul654 ( 453029 ) on Tuesday February 08, 2005 @01:54PM (#11608227) Homepage
    Dr. Trevor Mudge (U. Michigan) came to give a lecture at my University last year. He had an interesting proposal which I suspect is probably going to end up being used in nearly every architecture. The energy usage of a procesor is proportion to the square of the voltage - so dropping it as much as possible is desirable. The only problem is that once you get too close, you start getting bit level errors. He proposes to use a shadow register to keep track of values as they pass through and detect bit errors automatically, and route around them. If run at the optimal voltage (1.4 volts) a razored process will see a dramatic drop in energy consumption with a virtually-nonexistant hit to processing power.

  • Liquid Nitrogen, of course (Score:3, Interesting)

    by tajmorton ( 806296 ) on Tuesday February 08, 2005 @01:55PM (#11608237) Homepage
    As reported on /. a while back [tomshardware.com]. "Record Attempt: The 5 GHz Project"
  • The funkiest solution I ever heard of was submerging the entire motherboard in Mineral Oil and using some aquarium filters. Have wires running out of the soup to the hard drive, floppy and the rest and you're good to go.

    I'm told it was fun to watch as the mineral oil went through the filter and was cooled by the process of falling through the air.

    Don't know how long it ran before a technical problem though.

    It WAS something a coworker told me a college friend had told him about.

  • I like hot (Score:4, Funny)

    by SpongeBobLinuxPants ( 840979 ) on Tuesday February 08, 2005 @01:56PM (#11608261) Homepage
    I don't know what the problem is, I like hot chi... oh wait, you're talking about chips, nevermind...

  • Overheating vs. High Operating Temps (Score:4, Interesting)

    by BenBenBen ( 249969 ) on Tuesday February 08, 2005 @01:58PM (#11608275)
    The original poster makes the very common mistake of confusing hot chips with overheating chips - just because 90degC is hot to us meatbags, doesn't mean that it's dangerous to have ICs who run at this temp.

    There are many, many ICs that run happily for years at high operating temperatures (Blaupunkt's Digiceiver digital RF processor being one I'm familiar with).

    Saying this, I do run a 12" G4 PowerBook and can appreciate the delights of a 20degC chip...

  • What about (Score:3, Interesting)

    by LukaFox ( 765323 ) on Tuesday February 08, 2005 @01:58PM (#11608276)
    a liquid cooling system that is also a conversation piece http://nobispro.com/aquatank/ [nobispro.com]?

  • Cool Processors (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Pan T. Hose ( 707794 ) on Tuesday February 08, 2005 @01:59PM (#11608302) Homepage Journal
    How do I cool processors? Simple: I underclock them. Even a 10-20% less MHzs is usually enough to get rid of a noisy fan, i.e. the most stupid idea in the history of personal computers. Most of today's computers are I/O-bound anyway (Moore's law) so there is no performance loss whatsoever. Seems like an obvious solution.

  • And why was this article accepted?! (Score:5, Insightful)

    by William_Lee ( 834197 ) on Tuesday February 08, 2005 @02:01PM (#11608328)
    There was nothing new or innovative in the article, and it had the depth of Paris Hilton as far as actual real world cooling suggestions.

    There are a ton of different solutions out there both onchip and off including aircooling via different heatsink designs, watercooling, peltier cooling, and self contained refrigeration units.

    This article barely scraped the surface of anything useful or interesting related to cooling.

    Oh wait, this is /. I forgot for a moment...

  • Ducting (Score:5, Interesting)

    by kavachameleon ( 637997 ) on Tuesday February 08, 2005 @02:01PM (#11608333)
    When I first got my Prescott chip, it ran *way* too hot. Realized that the stock thermal pad was just acting as insulation, so I scraped it off and replaced it with Ceramique. It still ran warm, so I superglued a piece of 3" PVC pipe to my case fan. Now air blows right onto the processor area, and the CPU temps are great. I highly recommend the ducting. Cheap, easy, and oh-so-geeky.

    • Re:Ducting (Score:3, Interesting)

      by ctr2sprt ( 574731 )
      This is the way most rackmount servers work. Because of space concerns they can't easily fit a regular heatsink/fan combo in the case, especially with 2U (3.5" tall) or 1U (1.75" tall) cases. So they put a bunch of fans on the front or rear (or both) of the chassis and use a plastic duct to route the air over the processors and vent it out of the case. It also seems to be a common tactic among the low-end home desktop systems: the power supply fan is ducted over the CPU and out the back of the case. The

  • More efficient software (Score:3, Interesting)

    by G4from128k ( 686170 ) on Tuesday February 08, 2005 @02:01PM (#11608334)
    Call me a curmudgeon, but it seems like most of the heat is created by wasted cpu cycles [slashdot.org]. Eye candy is nice, but at 200 million computers in the U.S. alone, each Watt saved represents about $31 million in annual energy costs (assuming 40 hrs/wk, @ $0.074/kWHr. Reducing power consumption by 10 W would pay for a lot of good beer to fuel software development for more efficient software.
    • This still doesn't solve the peak temperature problem for when you ARE using all of the processer power (games)

      I like my eyecandy in games, and my AI, and my physics, and don't want to go back to not having those.

  • Excuse my Ignorance.... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by devphaeton ( 695736 ) on Tuesday February 08, 2005 @02:03PM (#11608351)
    ...but would increasing the size of the actual chip help any? Like a vented, flow-through design. The actual chip is about the size of a fingernail, i know, but if we increased it to the size of the whole plastic skirt around it (that which has all the pins) wouldn't that help heat dissipation?

    I haven't taken any measurements, but i'm willing to bet that the skirting around that wouldn't be much bigger- we've got more length on all sides, so we don't have to go as deep.

    However, i don't design microprocessors, and don't know anything about electronics, so i'm betting there's something i'm missing out- i.e. the impedance or capacitance effects of increasing the microscopic traces. I would assume someone has thought of this once before, but with all the rush to make stuff smaller and smaller, can it be overlooked?

    It's not like we don't have any spare room in a PC case, y'know...

    • Re:Excuse my Ignorance.... (Score:5, Informative)

      by david.given ( 6740 ) <dg@cowlark.com> on Tuesday February 08, 2005 @02:34PM (#11608715) Homepage Journal
      would increasing the size of the actual chip help any?

      It would --- but there would be other problems.

      The first one is the most simple: silicon's expensive. Really expensive. The more units you can slice off that wafer the cheaper the units are. Making the die bigger simply for thermal reasons isn't going to wash with the chip manufacturers. They already glue the die to a metal backing plate, which gives you much the same effect anyway.

      The second one, however, is the most crucial one. Electricity is slow. Electrical impulses travel at about 2/3 c through copper and a touch less through silicon (IIRC, I can't find the figures to check). This means that the bigger your die is, the longer it takes the impulses to travel from one side of it to the other.

      A 1GHz clock fires every 10^-9 seconds; since the speed of light is 3x10^8 m/s, this means that the impulses are going to travel about twenty centimetres between clock pulses. For a 4GHz clock, it'll be about 5cm. There's a lot more wiring than that folded up inside the die; and it gets worse --- particular things happen at particular times throughout the clock cycle, and where you are in the clock cycle now depends on how long the wire is that connects you to the clock. Making sure everything happens in sync is a nightmare.

      There are solutions to all of this; asynchronous designs which don't use clocks, offloading functionality to special-purpose processors like GPUs so you don't need as fast a main processor, radically different approaches like Cell, optical transports so you can route signals through each other, etc, but basically there are loads of good reasons why you need the die to be as small as humanly possible.

    • I don't design processors either, but wouldn't increasing their size actually make them go slower since there would have to be longer circuits? And don't longer circuits mean more overall resistance?

  • What a disappointment (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Noose For A Neck ( 610324 ) on Tuesday February 08, 2005 @02:06PM (#11608394)
    Here I was, all set to read an interesting article about technical solutions to the problem of heat transfer on microelectronic chips, and instead all I get is a bunch of fluffy gibberish that looks like it was written by a sophomore communications major in college.

    Color this mechanical engineer disappointed.

  • Insert Witty Title Here (Score:3, Funny)

    by LewsTherinKinslayer ( 817418 ) <lewstherinkinslayer@gmail.com> on Tuesday February 08, 2005 @02:07PM (#11608403) Homepage
    This is so lame, I think I should post it AC...

    ... but...

    The roof, the roof, the roof is on fire!

    (Or, for the Futurama fan in you, and me, Nixon: "The loot, the loot, the loot is on fire!")
  • The air surrounding the chip does not conduct heat efficiently. Therefore only the area in direct contact with the heatsink and/or cooling mechanism will drain heat from the chip.

    My invention is this: encase the chip in a liquid or (better) a solid that does not conduct electricity but is an excellent heat conductor. Alternatively, wrap the chip in a thin layer of insulating material and then encase the rest in a metal brick. The idea is to provide a large solid primary heat sink.

    The primary heat sink
  • I think the issue of cooling down hot/fast CPUs needs to be brought back onto why we need these hot CPUs in the first place.

    Intel have, in fact, been pulling the blinds over our eyes with the Pentium 4 series - particularly the infamous Prescott infernace. An entire industry exists in cooling down CPUs to the point that there's more reviews of silly cooling contraptions and water cooling kits on the web than there are the bits in PCs that do useful stuff.

    Why the Intel blinds? Because the Pentium M manag

    • Their problem is the megahertz myth...

      They've been pushing this for so long, that they can't look back now. Yes, the Pentium M's perform great, but they're still only around 1.7 GHz.

      While that out-performs P4's with MUCH higher clock-speeds, what are they going to say? Buy this CPU, it's 1.7GHz! Joe Sixpack would say "But I can buy this here Penteeyum Four with 4 GHz... 4 is better than 1.7."

      AMD has been rating their CPUs on performance to keep competitive with Intel's. If anything, Intel will have t
    • What's more, the chips cost less and they use a fraction as much power.
      In theory, I agree with you about the benefits of the Pentium M. However, in general, the "M" version are more expensive. Newegg lists the cheapest M at around $215. You can get a large selection of P4s at this price (not including celerons). So the price argument flies right out the window.

      But they ARE nice chips. Intel should re-engineer ALL of their chips to be more like the M.

  • Plagiarised again? (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Osty ( 16825 ) on Tuesday February 08, 2005 @02:38PM (#11608768)

    From the Slashdot summary

    Face it: the only scorching hot thing you want with a chip is salsa. Any other overheating is potentially counterproductive, and can be downright damaging to the microprocessor -- or other components. This article uncovers potential ways to chill the chips."
    and from the first paragraph of the article itself
    Face it: the only scorching hot thing you want with a chip is salsa. Any other overheating is potentially counterproductive, and can be downright damaging to the microprocessor -- or other components. In this Power Architecture challenge, developers warm up to the idea of how to cool down the hotter processors. From the weird to the wonderful, readers uncover potential ways to chill the chips.

    Aside from the removal of one sentence and a slight re-wording of the last, this is word for word the introduction to the article. If you were to submit this in a paper for a college (or even high school!) class, you'd be a good candidate for a plagiarism investigation.

    Once again, Slashdot editors, there's a very simple way to deal with this -- change the author attribution. Rather than saying, "DonnaMai writes ...", use "DonnaMai quotes ..." or "DonnaMai poorly paraphrases ...". By properly citing the summary as a quotation or paraphrasing* of the article, you would avoid the impression of plagiarism.

    * Yes, paraphrasing is allowed by fair use. In fact, if you're going to summarize an article, you want to paraphrase. However, paraphrasing is not, "Copy a sentence with a changed word here, drop a sentence there." You need to write a summarization in your own words, not take the article's words and (poorly) "massage" them so that they're not 100% identical (90% identical is still a problem).

  • The dudes and Overleap are more concerned with the effects of sustained heat on the motherboard, particularly the capacitors which reduces significantly the functional life of the circuitry. They figures they use estimate that today's current crop of CPUs generate enough heat to reduce the life of the motherboard by half or to about 3 years on average. So regardless of what is happening to the operational performance of the unit from too much heat, what's true is that come hell or high water your machine wi

  • Intel Branding (Score:3, Funny)

    by Junior J. Junior III ( 192702 ) on Tuesday February 08, 2005 @03:42PM (#11609562) Homepage
    Hotness is all about Intel's branding....

    Did you hear about the new hotness? Intel Pentium, SCORCHING PERFORMANCE! ssssssssss!

    Stick a Prescott on a long stick and apply that scortching brand on the rear end of any Longhorn cattle, and you've got yourself a stampede of sales, yeeeee-haw!

  • #1: Make sure your fans are facing correctly. (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Behrooz ( 302401 ) on Tuesday February 08, 2005 @05:01PM (#11610784)
    I can't believe nobody has said this yet, but the absolute FIRST thing you should do if your system is running over-hot is check the airflow and direction of all of your fans.

    Most ATX cases like to have a fan blowing in the front, and other fans blowing out the back, check your case documentation. If one of your fans isn't working well, or is actually facing the wrong way, the entire airflow scheme goes straight to hell. I've seen this happen several times, but now that cooling is so critical incorrect fan placement is often a show-stopper.

    Today's story? My buddy builds a new system with a new P4 3.4HT. It exhibits classic signs of overheating-- the fan sounds like a 747 taking off all the time, odd beeping, memory errors, and when his brother who actually built it for him runs 3DMark, it scores something like 40% of what it should have on CPU. Everest [lavalys.com]says it's running at >80C. Much freaking out is done, and they order a hardcore Thermaltake fan to replace the standard/weak one that came bundled with the processor. That comes, and it helps somewhat, so the processor isn't stepping itself down to non-melting temperatures, hanging at 65-70C full-performance. Memory errors still a bit of an issue.

    So I come over to look at it. Dumbass neighbor (Best Buy Geek Squad employee/Frat Boy) had put the front fan on facing backward while assisting with the assembly, so the front 80mm case fan was blowing OUT of the case.

    I unscrewed the fan, flipped it around, and two minutes later the computer was playing Far Cry and humming along at 40C, by far the quietest computer in the room.

    Moral of the story? If you have a misplaced or broken fan, your cooling power drops massively. It pays to actually look at your case documentation now. Oh, and buy Antec [antec.com].

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