Stopping your Athlon from burning

AFTER TOM PABST and his hardware site released it snow famous "burn your AMD CPU video" there was quite a lot of concern about the company's range of successful Athlon chips.

Here in tiny Bosnia Herzegovina, resellers re-considered and some even lowered their orders for AMD parts.

I spoke with two big computer shops and this what people at them said. They said: "Athlon's run hot" and processors can burn but they kept forgotting that not every Socket A cooler with large fans is right for the parts.

AMD sent me a few samples of processors and coolers, and while none of those coolers looked great, big and strong, but with my current CPU Athlon 1.4GHz with the Thunderbird core that uses 72W power consumption CPU, I have not had any burn outs or even system instability. How is that possible?

The other argument was about the Pentium 4s cooling superiority. Mighty Intel was not so nice to provide me with any samples of their mighty Pentium 4 processors and I am unable to tell from here whether this is a wonderfully cool and stable chip.

However, here in Bosina Herzegovina, all AMD's are tray chips and all Intel's Pentium 4s are expensive boxed versions that includes coolers, which Intel has tested for months and is suitable for the job.

On the other hand, a reseller just puts a CPU in your hand and you have to make the choice which cooler you should buy to fit to the chip. I noticed that many coolers that looked impressive worked like crap.

Be careful, then, that resellers don't sell you the wrong cooler, and make sure they've checked they're selling the right one for the right processor, as there are clear differences in higher clocked CPUs. This will, mostly, prevent chips going phut. And every decent motherboard nowadays should have PC shutdown limits.

If you avoid grey product, and buy boxed AMD chips or else have a reseller who takes care to match the cooling chip to the system, you should be just fine and avoid incendiary situtation. µ