how wud i know if my p3 is dead?

[spazzkid]

scenario:
i was tinkering with my p3 minutes ago... i removed the stock heatsink... cleaned the core... put out my volcano2 and tried to put it on my p3... i had a hard time reaching the hook thingy... so after a while , i took off the volcano2 then i saw glasslike particles under... i panicked, i might have broken the core... so i cleaned all up. put thermal paste and stuck the stock hsf.

I booted up pc... it did a post. <i sigh with relief>... so my question is... did i really damage my p3? if yes, how come it still boots? how do i know if i damaged my p3?

any ideas are welcome.

[KILLorBE]

If it still does a POST its probably fine, mine is damaged as well but it still works fine.
(Pic here (http://forums.overclockers.ws/vb/attachment.php?s=&postid=252186)) N/M the quality of the pics:p .

[spazzkid]

ouch! mine's more tinier. howbout the performance? still the same? does it still oc well?

[KILLorBE]

Performance is still the same, and it OC's the same.
Actually I got it higher than before, but that's because I'm using a TEC now.

The whole story:
I have a PEP66 (with 4 "feet", 1 on each corner) I reaplied ASII and mounted it....eveything was fine, after a couple of days my temps went up, so I had a look...cavaties (sp?) in my CPU:confused: (I didn't move my rig or whatever), anyway I cleaned my HSF and CPU put some ASII on it, put it back together and everything was fine again (BTW its a PIII600@840 cA2).

Usually it wouldn't POST @ 852, certainly not @ 864, no matter what CV I threw at it, well a couple of months ago I decided to put a TEC on my PEP66.....good decision.....888 w/o problems and it runs @ 900 ~90% stable.

To make a long story short, the best it would do before this happened was 840 and after the 'blue layer' came of I was still stuck at 840 (with the same cooling that is, with the TEC @ 888 it doesn't like temps above 30C....ah well its an 'old'(cA2) chip).

[spazzkid]

good to hear your success story. as for me, i will be looking for weird happenings on my poor p3. im planning to use as a dedicated game server.

[spazzkid]

bump. any of u guys have any ideas on how to find out if my intel baby is dead?

[minoukat]

OC it to hell, try the same as before, and more if it's stable, try a couple of CPU-intensive games and proggies, do torture tests, like Folding and Seti@home, or Prime95 or other things.