AMD CPUs, Again

The Inquirer has an article called "Athlon XP fries egg and survives."  Apparently some guy cooked an egg on his computer’s processor.

The article says:

Our friends at THG made a video that crippled AMD sales a few years ago that showed you could kill your CPU when you remove the cooler.  But things have changed.

(I posted about that video two years ago.)

The article also says:

I see this experiment as a very good one since you can remove a cooler for 11 minutes from Athlon XP 1500+ and you won’t destroy it.

But that isn’t what actually happened here.  And after being misled another time by The Inquirer last week -- they had an article titled "400GB DVD Recorder" about a device which wasn’t a DVD Recorder, it was a hard-disk recorder with a DVD reader -- I was fed up.  I emailed the editor and author.  The author’s response is color-coded as are my comments.

Regarding: http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=16871 which says:

"I see this experiment as a very good one since you can remove a cooler for 11 minutes from Athlon XP 1500+ and you won’t destroy it."

He removed the cooler that had been on the CPU before, but he added another one.  As you can plainly see on his site, he created a giant oddly-shaped heatsink made out of coins, and it has a ton of surface area.  The above-quoted statement implies that this is equivalent to running the CPU totally naked, but that isn’t the case at all.

true Anthony but think about the fact that you need quite more then 100 Celsius to cook anything and 100 should destroy your CPU

and it didn’t

First of all, that’s completely false.  According to foodsafety.gov, some cooking temperatures are:

Eggs  "Cook until yolk and white are firm"
Egg dishes		160F/71C
Well done beef		170F/77C
Ground turkey, chicken	165F/74C

Second of all, it misses the whole point.  The point is, this entire experiment was a demonstration of pulling heat out of the CPU and into a raw, cold egg.  And even without the egg, there was still a copper heat sink with lots of surface area to radiate heat away from the CPU.

Nothing about this experiment was remotely similar to running a naked CPU, as in the old THG video.  There’s no reason to believe this CPU reached anything like 100C, especially given the fact that it had a giant heat sink and a raw cold egg on top of it, and the experiment was stopped once the egg cooked.

my point is that at 100 Celsius you should destroy your CPU and I did that and my XP didn’t crash it even at more then 100 for few mins

That’s interesting, since everything I’ve ever read has indicated that 80C is unstable, and 85-90C represents a "critical point" for an XP.

But that still doesn’t address the issue.  The issue is that the article says:

"I see this experiment as a very good one since you can remove a cooler for 11 minutes from Athlon XP 1500+ and you won’t destroy it."

But that is flat-out false.  He did not remove the cooler.  He replaced one cooler with another.

I agree about the statement

Well, I’m glad he agrees.  But I suppose it’s too much to expect them to edit the piece now, even though 2 of its 6 sentences are incorrect.