Accidental Fanless CNPS-7000-AlCu

Coolin · Post by **Coolin** » Mon Feb 20, 2006 1:47 pm

I built myself a pretty quiet system in April 2005 and was pretty happy with it. I managed to get away with no case fans, to make sure that the computer was silent to my ears. The only fans in the system were a super-undervolted (~3V) Zalman 7000-AlCu on and a Seasonic S12 380W. My CPU is an Athlon 64 3000+ Winchester at stock speeds and undervolted to about 1.15v with Cool n Quiet disabled. My video card was also fanless.

Anyway, lately I noticed my computer being unstable. But I never really paid attention to it, since I was busy with schoolwork. But today I figured that I might as well check if anything was wrong. I fired up Everest to take a look at my CPU temperature, and to my surprise, the info for CPU temperature had disappeared! I wondered what was going on, and opened up my case to see if any dust had settled on the CPU heatsink, decreasing its efficiency.

When I opened up my case, I saw that the CPU fan had completely stopped! Apparently, I somehow disconnected the power cable to my CPU fan while installing my Radeon 9200 during Christmas break. I immediately plugged the fan back in again and fired up Everest again. My CPU is now at a more comfortable 48 degrees Celsius (as read by Everest). Soltek Hardware Monitor reads it as 38 degrees.

So a couple questions here...

I had left my computer on 24/7 for almost two months with my CPU fan disconnected, and my computer still ran fine (mostly). How the heck did that happen? I have practically no air circulation in my case since I removed all my case fans. The Seasonic S12 also pushes next to no air, since I don't feel any wind coming out the back of the PSU when I put my hand to it. In essence, my computer was running essentially completely passive.

Also, is there any chance of permanent CPU damage from what I did with my 2 month constant overheating of my processor?

DigitalN. · Post by **DigitalN.** » Tue Feb 21, 2006 6:47 pm

well as long as under stress it doesn't crash, I'd say you got lucky. do a 24 hour run of Prime to make sure

jAMBAZZ · Post by **jAMBAZZ** » Tue Feb 28, 2006 4:54 am

I was wondering why it didnt become unstable before now, and perhaps this could be owed to the ambient temp? Temperature in your room increased since x-mas break?

Anyways, underclocked @ 1,15 the Winchester idles @ approximately 4Watt. The Zalman will transfer enough heat from the CPU Core to make it stable, remember the CPU is marked to work up to 65c according to AMD.. And since you UNDERvolted from default 1,4 to 1,15 the operating temp of the CPU will be able to increase, prolly to the same amount as the mobile turion chips, which is 95c.