You could make a tray out of alfoil and fry some eggs in it

There are videos on YouTube showing retro CPUs having their heatsinks removed during gameplay, and starting to emit smoke within seconds, so I think it depends on what type of CPUs you intend to quickly test. Tasty egg BTW.

Untested idea: Do you primarily want to avoid attaching the heatsink? (Perhaps it's awkward.) You could slap some paste on to the CPU, and then physically hold a heatsink tightly against the CPU, while you quickly look at the BIOS POST screen. Having someone else around might help, as you might need both hands to hold the heatsink. /Untested idea.

Unfortunately, just blasting air at a CPU won't work too well, unless it's something fairly sluggish, such as something less than say about 200MHz. I think.

What you could do is vastly underclock it and use a copper cooler on it. I used a Socket A Athlon 1200 underclocked to 900 as my test CPU and it survived multiple instances of me having forgotten to apply thermal paste.

You can forget about using no thermal paste with the really hot chips (think Palomino 2000+ etc) as those will burn anyway without thermal paste, heatsink or not!

Easy!

If it's a tower, just tilt it so that the CPU lies horizontally. Remove the clips from the cooler and just put it over the CPU. Then put a weight ontop and you are set.

If you don't have a weight, just use the clips without the paste. It will be absolutely fine, especially if you have a decent / substantial cooler out of copper.

Cooler without a fan will work for a short period, but no chance a fan without a cooler will work. Instant death...

Tomshardware used to test this, they removed the cooler while the machine was running. Intel throttled and then shut down the machine (brute force). AMD... Well let's just say there was a bit of smoke 😀

That was with the Athlon XP I believe.

Just lay the case horizontally, and put your heatsink on top. As long as it doesn't move around too much, it should work fine.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

Tomshardware used to test this, they removed the cooler while the machine was running. Intel throttled and then shut down the machine (brute force). AMD... Well let's just say there was a bit of smoke 😀

That was with the Athlon XP I believe.

I remember that. Toms Hardware did a test on the Pentium III, P4 423 and Athlon Thunderbird. The P3 shut down, P4 throttled down to a crawl and the AMD burnt up in smoke. They did a later test where they used a Palomino based Athlon 4 (Mobile) that was supposed to have a thermal diode, but it baked too. The end result is that AMD went scrambling for a standardized chipset power safety feature in case the fan became dislodged in transit or was forgotten - a very real possibilty in those days.
When the Athlon XP fully launched they had a cutoff system that worked like the P3s did, but relied on motherboard circuitry that was up to the motherboard vendor to implement - so it was always an issue. That said the cutoff on my old Asus A7S333 saved my bacon a few times.

Here's the orignal video - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nYhEpHEPqcc

Now back on topic, personally I just clip a small fan on or off each time I want to test a new CPU, I don't worry about the thermal paste, as long as the surfaces are even and theres contact it'll be fine for a few minutes. Paste it up if you plan to leave it that way.