Re:'PC Building Simulator' Is More Fun Than Building a Real ...
by wtallis on Thursday March 29, 2018 @05:27PM
(#16711197)
Almost all of those fears you enumerate are unfounded. You won't kill a processor through overheating if you forget to plug in a fan. Not properly securing your CPU heatsink only really poses a risk to the GPU that it could fall onto. Likewise for your concerns about the SSD's temperature: it'll throttle itself and shutdown if necessary, but the latter won't happen even if you're blowing 85°C air from a GPU directly onto the SSD—I've tested that with most of the M.2 NVMe SSDs on the market. There are essentially zero connectors inside the PC that allow for the mechanical possibility of connecting dangerous voltages to the expensive components.
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Re:'PC Building Simulator' Is More Fun Than Building a Real ...
by stouset on Thursday March 29, 2018 @06:38PM
(#16711803)
Whether or not those fears are well-founded is beside the point. I know that components will undergo a safe thermal shutdown. I know that power cables mostly can't go anywhere they shouldn't go. And I still get anxiety around it, even as a person who doesn't get much anxiety. Expecting a nontechnical novice to feel comfortable doing these things is asking a lot.
Plus, there's still a lot that actually can go wrong. Crappy PSUs and built up static electricity have killed uncountable motherboards and GPUs. Misconfiguring your BIOS can actually kill your components, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly.
Re:'PC Building Simulator' Is More Fun Than Building a Real ...
by slededit on Thursday March 29, 2018 @05:53PM
(#16711408)
But back in the P4 days man was it easy to melt your expensive processor. They didn't have fancy things like thermal shutdown then either.
Re:'PC Building Simulator' Is More Fun Than Building a Real ...
by wtallis on Thursday March 29, 2018 @06:19PM
(#16711627)
Thermal shutdown was added fairly early in the P4 days. I recall a Tom's Hardware video showing removing the heatsink from a P4 while it was running Quake 3 and the framerate tanking but no crash, while the Athlon (XP?) next to it went up in smoke when the heatsink was removed.
Re:'PC Building Simulator' Is More Fun Than Building a Real ...
by jotm on Thursday March 29, 2018 @06:41PM
(#16711836)
That was for AMDs, and I believe by the time of Pentium 4, even Athlons had thermal safeties. I remember quick testing (see if it powers on) Pentium 3s, Celerons and P4s without the heatsink - they even managed to boot Windows before shutting down lol. Same for GPUs.
Re:'PC Building Simulator' Is More Fun Than Building a Real ...
by slededit on Thursday March 29, 2018 @06:47PM
(#16711888)
I managed to melt one by incorrectly applying a heatsink. Years later we did some "experiments" on an old P4 to test the cooling capabilities of scotch. It's not effective FYI.
Re:'PC Building Simulator' Is More Fun Than Building a Real ...
by stouset on Friday March 30, 2018 @03:14PM
(#16718964)
Funnily enough, a friend of mine had his GPU die due to heat yesterday. He'd been mucking about with performance settings, and apparently set his MSI card to use too much power and not enough fan.
GPU hit > 95˚C and is now a several hundred dollar paperweight.