On Mon, May 19, 2003 at 01:57:40PM +0900, Curt Sampson wrote:
>
> On Sat, 17 May 2003, Ben Hutchings wrote:
>
> > No, the program spins its wheels until it detects a change in an
> > object reference. There are many badly built PCs which will overheat
> > if you make full use of them for a few minutes.
>
> If by "overheat" you mean, not simply running hot enough that there will
> be a reduction in component life, but hot enough that you will start to
> get random memory errors with any sort of frequency, I'd like to see
> your evidence for this. Such a computer would be crashing on a regular
> basis, and would soon enough corrupt its disk (as the researchers
> themselves experienced).
<snip>
A lot of people have unfortunately got used to the idea that PCs are
unstable because of Windows 95/98/Me and badly written apps. So they
accept that PCs are unstable. However, sometimes it's hardware, not
software, at fault.
Inadequate heatsinks or fans, poorly attached heatsinks, clogged fans,
overclocked processors and poor layout of cables (so they get in the
way of overflow) can all lead to overheating. I have had problems
with unreliable fans in the past that led to the CPU overheating, and
I would see processor-intensive apps crash but not the whole system.
The motherboard I was using has an over-temperature alarm but it
didn't go off in these cases, if I remember correctly. So the PC was
mostly working but would still suffer memory corruption in some apps,
until I got the fan fixed.
I'm afraid I don't have anything other than anecdotal evidence that
overheating is a common problem. However, I wonder why the various
temperature monitoring and control systems have been implemented on PC
motherboards and in CPUs if it isn't a significant risk. (This means
that the risk is being removed or greatly reduced, but it's still
there in older PCs.)
--
Ben Hutchings | personal web site: http://womble.decadentplace.org.uk/
The two most common things in the universe are hydrogen and stupidity.
Received on Tue May 20 01:22:33 2003