CPU frying within seconds without heatsink is a myth?

dronz

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Aug 1, 2015
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Yesterday I heard a small thud from inside my PC. Stupidly, I ignored it - largely because I wanted to fit in a game of dota before lectures and I was short on time. It was only when I got to the pick screen and noticed my FPS was tanking to <30 that I realised I needed to turn off my PC because something was wrong. So, I quit the game, and shut down my computer (using the start menu, not even rapidly unplugging it from the wall like I should have done).

I opened up my computer to find the CPU heatsink/fan had fallen off and was lying at the bottom of the case. Meaning that my CPU had been operating for 2-3 minutes without a heatsink. And not idle either - in a game.

After googling I realised I couldn't put the fan back on straight away because I needed to buy more thermal paste. And after spending time researching the potential consequences of the mishap I read in a lot of places that a CPU will fry itself in ten seconds without a heatsink.

Naturally I was extremely worried about the damage I had potentially done to my three month old CPU. But I was pretty sceptical of the whole ten second cook notion, since I had just witnessed my own CPU run for almost 200 seconds under fairly heavy load with no heatsink, without even thermtrip kicking in, never mind any actual frying.

Every single thread I've visited overwhelmingly agrees that running a CPU with no heatsink, even just loading the BIOS, is likely to cause damage within mere seconds. Arctic silver says "A modern high performance CPU can be permanently damaged in less than 10 seconds without
proper cooling".

But this clearly wasn't the case at all for my CPU, which still works perfectly after minutes with no heatsink. So what is the truth? Is the frying thing a myth? Is everyone being extremely overcautious about never ever ever testing a CPU without a heatsink? Do Haswell Refresh processors just run amazingly cold even with no cooling? Any input would be appreciated!

TL/DR: My CPU ran in-game for 3 minutes with no heatsink and works perfectly. Is "a CPU will fry itself in ten seconds" a complete myth?

 


What CPU did you have? Your CPU probably didnt throttle fully and didnt turn off, but we know the CPU thermal throttled to a slow speed and lowered its voltage as you "tanked" FPS in your game... It's hard to fry the CPU as the CPU will instantly throttle or turn off, but it is possible to kill it, AMD CPUs from the AMD64 era (2003) would instantly start smoking when the heatsink was taken off.

 
its not a Myth, but it dose rely largely on what CPU you have, the later Gen models will actually tone themselves down in both speed and power and even manually turn themselves off to stop damage on a computer, now if your cpu was at 100% load for 10 seconds then without turning itself down or off yes it would fry, but as your fps dropped drastically it means that the CPU slowed itself down to cool itself you should be ok but without being there to test I cant tell you for sure
 
As said, that was old CPU's. Toms even did a video long, long, long ago of the AMD's and removing the heatsink and poof.

Nowadays thermal throttling handles all that for you. Too hot, downclocks itself, really hot, shuts off.