I bought this used cooler from a guy some time ago, one of those that came with the paste already applied into the heatsink base, with a protective film over it to preserve it... As you know, you have to remove that film for the CPU to do proper contact with the thermal paste.
Well, when I bought it, the film was still there, with signs of it beign burned.
I suppose the guy used this over all those years without removing the film. Worst thing, that cooler was used with some Prescott processor, and those ran hot. Don't know if the CPU survived that.

P4s throttle themselves to prevent total meltdowns like with the glorious AMD Athlon (pre 64). 😀 So I'm sure it survived. They won't exceed their design power.

I don't think I've ever seen a CPU die from heat unless it was really extreme like with a dead fan or powered up without a heatsink. Then you'll see magic smoke and scorch marks. The die might detach from the package. And again this is only with Athlon/Duron.

Yes I do remember smoking a Duron or two before AMD installed their version of a thermal diode into the CPU's 😉

I love that term "Magic Smoke" when in fact it's burnt silicon and copper etched traces 😜

I remember my former roommate (who had lots of disposable income to blow on PC parts) burned out an AMD Athlon CPU by booting it with an incorrectly-connected fan. Nothing exciting happened, though, it just didn't boot very far and then wouldn't boot at all after we got everything right. He bought another CPU and it worked fine.

unmei220 wrote:

I bought this used cooler from a guy some time ago, one of those that came with the paste already applied into the heatsink base, with a protective film over it to preserve it... As you know, you have to remove that film for the CPU to do proper contact with the thermal paste.
Well, when I bought it, the film was still there, with signs of it beign burned.
I suppose the guy used this over all those years without removing the film. Worst thing, that cooler was used with some Prescott processor, and those ran hot. Don't know if the CPU survived that.

You mean something like this 😉 Only diference is that one i seen was duron 900 and it survived it - probably been working few years like that...