On Tue, Jun 19, 2001 at 09:57:50PM -0500, you [Robert Redelmeier] claimed:
>
> Bad CPU is certainly a possibility -- poor cooling is more likely,
> especially a lack of thermal grease or a cocked heatsink. The K7
> doesn't have a thermal trip and will fry itself if overheated.
So K7's do actually fry themselves so that they won't ever recover? I was
under suspicion that most CPU's will halt before they actually totally fry
themselves - this one booted and ran fine until suddenly died completely.
> What most likely happened here is the CPU overheated under MS-Win98.
> It doesn't have idle-at-HLT and does busyloops. This keeps the CPU
> at around 70% of max load. Linux idles at HLT and stays cool (<10%).
Yes, but he only booted into Win98 shortly to install the sound card
driver. He had ran DivX decode, opengl stuff and stuff like that in Linux.
It _is_ possible that the heat was the culprit though - although the CPU fan
seemed to run perfectly ok, he said that it kept strange noise.
It didn't smell burned, though, as did one Athlon I saw constantly crashing
because the assembler had forgot to plug in the fan... But that Athlon
didn't fry, it halted.
> Even doing a kernel compile only loads the CPU to about 75% and only
> for 3 minutes. Most everything else is much less, even (especially)
> distro installs. Unless he was running something continuously under
> Linux, it's unlikely his CPU got hot.
I'm not sure he tried cpuburn at one point, but I at least recommended to
him when he installed the box. The box had ran smoothly for half a year, so
it seems the (possible) heat problem must have been introduced only lately.
I can't understand how, however, since the cpu was still mounted firmly as
was the fan.
And he never saw anything strange in cpu temperature readings under linux.
Anyhow, he is now having a warranty replacement for the cpu; hopefully that
solves the problem.
thanks,
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