I’ve been enjoying your page for about a year now – time to “give some back”
I pan-fried an AMD T-Bird 1Ghz, and am pretty sure it was my own fault. Put it on an Abit KT7A with a ThermoSonic Cooler (darn, but it was fidgety to get on). Playing around with the VIA hardware monitor, I saw the temp of the chip was roughly 38C and I thought, “Gosh, that’s hot.” (Didn’t know any better). Figured I must not have got the Arctic Silver on quite right, or smeared some off or SOMETHING.
Took the heatsink off, cleaned the chip, reapplied the Arctic Silver… and what the heck, lets pencil those L1 bridges at the same time.
Hmmmm. I wonder if I did a proper job on those L1 bridges? Wonder if it will boot at a higher multiple? Just want to check – don’t want to have to put that monster ThermoEngine on and off (what a pain), and besides, I could crack the chip.
We’ll just do a quickie test-boot to see how she POSTs. The chip lasted just about that long until meltdown – POST flashed up on the screen at the higher multiplier (11x) followed by the tiniest, most expensive fireworks display – blue flash and smoke right from the CPU. Spent the next half hour trying to get life from the chip and convince myself that it *might* still work (sort of like “QUINCY” trying for a pulse). No way – the magic smoke was out of the box.
I now have a 1.1 T-Bird replacement running at about 43C. Happy with the temp, but itching to overclock – this time I have that silver windscreen defroster paint… but have not worked up the nerve yet. Darn sure I will not run the chip for even a millisecond without cooling.
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