Question CPU fan was unplugged for months...

[frymillstrum]

So I was having an issue where my PC would just randomly crash across a variety of "normal use" situations (Browsing Chrome, watching movies with VLC, using file explorer). Sometimes it would hang for ages before crashing, sometimes it would just switch off. Event viewer also logged it as a hardware error but I didn't open it up for....some reason.
Anyway, I was away for a week and when I came back the issue no longer happened. A month later and I just opened the PC for a clean and noticed the CPU fan was unplugged, it's likely I unplugged it by mistake a couple of weeks ago. I think the PC stopped crashing when I came back after a week because the weather had gradually been getting cooler again.

My question is, is it even possible that the PC was ever able to run for long periods of time without crashing, even while playing games like Cyberpunk at 1440p? Would the weather have made that much of a difference that it could run for weeks on end without a CPU fan just because it wasn't warm outside anymore? Also, could I have potentially damaged my CPU by running it without a fan for over a month?

More curious than anything.
Thanks in advance for thoughts/opinions/help.

 

[Zerk2012]

So I was having an issue where my PC would just randomly crash across a variety of "normal use" situations (Browsing Chrome, watching movies with VLC, using file explorer). Sometimes it would hang for ages before crashing, sometimes it would just switch off. Event viewer also logged it as a hardware error but I didn't open it up for....some reason.
Anyway, I was away for a week and when I came back the issue no longer happened. A month later and I just opened the PC for a clean and noticed the CPU fan was unplugged, it's likely I unplugged it by mistake a couple of weeks ago. I think the PC stopped crashing when I came back after a week because the weather had gradually been getting cooler again.

My question is, is it even possible that the PC was ever able to run for long periods of time without crashing, even while playing games like Cyberpunk at 1440p? Would the weather have made that much of a difference that it could run for weeks on end without a CPU fan just because it wasn't warm outside anymore? Also, could I have potentially damaged my CPU by running it without a fan for over a month?

More curious than anything.
Thanks in advance for thoughts/opinions/help.

Anything is possible but your motherboard should of gave a CPU fan error.

 

[DSzymborski]

Was this a fan on a heatsink or a fan on an AIO? Leaving out basic details makes it hard to answer a question.

 

[frymillstrum]

Was this a fan on a heatsink or a fan on an AIO? Leaving out basic details makes it hard to answer a question.

Sorry, I thought I had been thorough. It's a heatsink fan.

 

[Paulie walnuts1888]

case fans can easily cool a lower tdp chip

 

[PsychoPsyops]

I would reapply thermal paste to it, then run sfc /scannow in command prompt.