[camram-spam] Re: Microsoft publicly announces Penny Black PoW postage project

[James A. Donald]

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Alan Brown wrote:
> >  I just hope you're right
> > about the CPUs burning up - it doesn't happen when machines 
> > are running OGR calculations, so I suspect that you just 
> > ran into a particularly badly built example.

Eric S. Johansson
> no, it was a stock Intel motherboard, CPU, CPU fan in a 
> standard (i.e. not cheap) case with reasonably sized power 
> supply (i.e. 300 watts). It has the standard number of fans.

With modern CPUs one needs a great deal of care installing the 
heat sink to avoid overheating.   A standard CPU fan is not 
equivalent to a competently built computer.

A modern bios has the capability to switch the computer off if 
it detects overheating.  Unfortunately this capability is often 
off by default, or is deliberately switched off by shoddy 
assemblers who do not care whether they have installed 
functional CPU cooling -- and they usually have not.

I recently built a computer for my son.  Went through two CPU 
cooling systems before I got satisfactory cooling with the 
third system   Then after the a few months the rather small and 
fragile plastic motherboard clip that held the extremely 
massive cooling system against the CPU cracked, impairing 
cooling efficiency, and I had to take the system apart and 
McGyver a clip out of inductor wire.  Since it has worked fine. 
Modern cpu cooling systems are so massive that we need metal to 
metal clips all the way through the mother board, but today's 
motherboards still come with these frail little crappy plastic 
clips suitable only for old style fans.


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         James A. Donald
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