[mythtv-users] NewEgg Cheap Nvidia GT220 Cards

Ian Clark mrrooster at gmail.com
Tue Dec 22 12:29:22 UTC 2009


2009/12/3 David L <idht4n at gmail.com>

> On Thu, Dec 3, 2009 at 9:08 AM, John Drescher wrote:
> <snip>
> > And also you may not know the fan died quickly enough. At my
> > department at work this is the #1 cause of GPU and motherboard deaths
> > over the last 5 years.
> >
>
> I naively assumed that most modern processors would
> detect high temperatures and shut themselves down before
> self destructing.  This is obviously not the case, but I'm
> wondering why not?  Are there some processors that
> have this feature and some that don't?
>
> Most modern processors (since the P4) will do this, however:-

1. It has to be enabled in the bios
2. It's not guaranteed. :)

So long as your heatsink isn't badly crudded up, or way too inadiquate you
should be able to survive a fan failure on a cpu without too much incident
these days. This may not be the case if you're loading a quad core 100% load
at the time of failure, or if you're overclocking and have disabled the
thermal protection cutoff, but generally you should be okay.

IIRC it was introduced first on intel gear, I think the P4 had it, whereas
the Athlon at the time didn't. (There's a video somewhere of someone playing
Quake 3 on a pentium 4, and removing the heatsink. [1])

However, most modern CPUs should have it from both camps. (although your
chances of owning an AMD cpu without it are probably slightly higher.)

It's also worth mentioning that most motherboards feature some independant
'shutdown on fan fail', 'shutdown when temp exceeds x' settings which should
also be used, as they'll catch things long before the CPU protection does.
The CPU protection really is there just to stop it going bang.

Cheers,

Ian

[1] http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/hot-spot,365-6.html (From 2001)
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