I just had a good scare.

[Rowsol]

I was helping a friend diagnose his computer and he had what appeared to be a broken fan. I hooked it up to my computer and it worked fine. He unplugged it.

We started watching a video and about 15 minutes later the computer shut down almost instantly and then on boot up I got the blue screen of death. Restarting the computer kept giving me blue screens.

I restored my bios to default (I had a 500 mhz overclock) and then the computer booted fine. It shut down again 30 seconds later. After another restart I happen to glance down at the bottom right where the Core Temp reading is at. It says 100c!. At first I thought it was a bug or typo but then it made sense.

I looked in the computer and the power cord for my cpu fan had been unplugged, most likely when he was detaching the fan. You see, I have a cheapo cpu fan adjustment knob on the back pci slot that needs power to run. Even detached the computer doesn't know any different because the cpu fan header is still being plugged.

I touched the side of the heatsink to make sure core temp wasn't bugged. Sure enough, it was right. Burned the hell out of myself.

Grabbed a vacuum and started blowing on the heatsink.

Now here I am typing this out. Scared the hell out of me. Thought it would make a fun read. I wonder how many years of life I knocked out of this AMD cpu running at 100c for 5 minutes or so. I know Intels can run up to 100c and I had previously read that AMD tops out at 70c, but apparently it can hit 100c before crashing.

 

[natr0n]

They are designed to shutdown after a heat limit it wont affect it negatively. This also happed to me once on a dual core 939 chip,but it never had an issue after and overclocked crazy high.

 

[Ja.KooLit]

it happen to me once.... it was AIO 120 rad. I did something in my computer... Then boot up..... it works yay!

started playing..... after 3 mins it started lagging... wth! ... I check CPU-z my 3770k is stucked at 1.6 GHZ wtf... i check temp it was 100c.... shoot..... i check fan on rad, it was running. I touch the cooler... damn its hot..... so i shut down computer. check all connections then shoot power (plug on fan header) was not connected.....

lesson learned. indeed... check all connection first before pushing the power button ^_^

 

[kn00tcn]

ya i would think modern cpus have protection

even that classic 'amd cpu explodes out of mobo' video from a decade ago was confirmed fake

 

[Blue-Knight]

...check all connection first before pushing the power button ^_^

Leaving the option "CPU Fan Fail Warning" enabled in BIOS settings is good as well. If your system has a speaker...

Anyway, if I remember correctly my Celeron D 356 reduced the clock when its temperature reached 90°C. And it reached that with the fan actually working! We have hot summer days here!

So, room temperature matters (a lot)!

 

[itsakjt]

I had a similar experience. My dad and me were cleaning the computer(Pentium 4 630 3.0 GHz, LGA 775 and Intel D915GAV motherboard). We took out the heatsink and cleaned the fins. I did not know much about computer hardware then. We made sure not to damage the thermal compound(as written on manual). Finally, after we fitted the heatsink, we turned on the computer. After sometime, the CPU fan went to full speed and was not going down. All games were lagging(little did I know about throttling). I checked BIOS and temps were 91 degree C for the CPU. We turned off power and again refitted the heatsink. This time, the system shut down while in the Windows XP loading screen. We turned it on again and got the following message:
"The system was shut down due to a thermal event(overheating). Service the unit right away."

We again took apart the heatsink and refitted it but this time with a lot of patience and making sure all the push-pull clips go down the holes. Then we power on and bingo, it was good as new with BIOS temps at 45-47 C.. We didn't even changed the thermal compound(didn't know it has to be done) but did it after 1-1.5 years of this experience. But the system worked perfectly. The CPU lasted for 7 years until it died because of extreme overclocking(motherboard sent more voltage than specified).

Later on, I found out that the CPU started throttling after it hit 64 degree C and shut down at 100 degree C.