At the beige box retailer I worked for, about a decade ago, we got a couple of the local high school's computers in for repairs. They told us the systems just wouldn't boot, and they "smelled funny."

Took the case off, and behold! The Intel fan had seized, melted, and caught fire. It wasn't a particularly old system so I'm not sure how the thermal protection didn't kick in, but that had happened on two near-identical systems. No saving those boards.

For a couple of years, 2007-2009, I kept encountering budget-build AMD boxes with cooked thermal compund. The first time a client brought in a comouter with the heatsink rolling around loose on the bottom of the case, I thought it was rough treatment, customer error. But then two more, Dell instead of eMachines or Compaq... weird.

That's not surprising. Towards the end of the Mhz Wars the heatsinks had become pretty ungainly but they were still using the flimsy spring clip instead of the more modern 4 post or gantry type systems used today (sorry I'm sure they have proper names but damned if I know what they are).

I had a solid copper heatsink that was easily 5lbs for my Athlon XP system. I held onto it for the longest time after I got rid of the system because I knew the metal was easily worth $20.