After having a conversation with my brother who hasnt really been following computers for the last year i have come here asking for help... he thinks that amd's still run hotter then intels! and he still thinks they perform better. I tried to find some good articles but im sure that with the huge amoutn of knowledge on this board youguys have some better articles. i wasnt sure about this question either.. if the heatsink were to come off of an amd cpu.. do they have some kind of protection to keep it from overheating like an intel cpu? so please help me show him the AMD light.. i wouldnt trade my amd system for 3 pentium systems!

I am not sure how any CPU would do if you really ran it without a cooler, I would expect it to die within 3 seconds, but never tried it. Have heard Intel is somewhat better with protection, but that was a year or so ago... [/shrugs]
Best advice, run with a cooler and fan...

seems to be a legitimate fear for him.. i have no idea why.. but it is..

For the most part AMD chips run cooler than Intel and outperform Intel in gaming performance. If you do a lot of video editing Intel still out performs the AMD but with the x64 dual core chips the lead by Intel is minimal. Also Your motherboard should have the ability to turn your computer off when it hits a certain temperature and you should be able to set that in your BIOS.

Power consumption (Heat).

http://techreport.com/onearticle.x/7417


Performance:

http://www23.tomshardware.com/cpu.html

Try and measure two CPUs with the same pricetag.

And AMD has had heat protection since the Athlon XP.

But can either actually run after trying to boot with NO COOLER?

You can't run without cooler but the CPU won't be broken. Just put the cooler back and it will run.

Dont you remeber tom's test years ago when they removed the coolers of various CPU's? The pentium4 systems crashed and then turned themselfs off, it was impossible to fry them because of intels thermal protection. AMD CPU's fried which quickly prompted AMD to install thermal protection in all its CPU's (although I believe that with the first CPU's the motherboard had to supports it).

Yes I remember that article, but did not recall if they could handle actually being booted or attempted to with no cooler at all, which is redicoulas anyway...

well I assume that if you attempted to boot without a cooler they would just just off in the same way they would if you removed the cooler while they were on. Why you would boot a computer with no hsf is another question.

I wouldnt, but the op questioned it...

In the old "what happens when you remove the cpu cooler" review/video the P4 (wilamette at the time) did not crash - it stayed working and just slowed down to like 15fps or worse and when the cooler was put back on it sped up again, the P3 cu stoped at 38c or something.

The AMD's all fried, including the XP which did have a thermal diode but aparently wasnt quick enough to detect overheating and failed.

On the other hand in the new test the both AMD and Intel Processors shut down after a few seconds with the hsf's removed - all the cpus survived.

Check the THG video section, download em and see for your self.

AMD's cleaned up there act and now there as safer as the Intels - A64s dont overheat compared to the Prescott.

Most boards will auto-shutdown before any damage occurs.

My A64 often shuts its fan off when not loaded on its own so i'm pretty sure it doesnt run THAT hot

Thats does happen with some boards and cool n quiet enabled, however, without at least the metal heatsink a CPU will quickly overheat.

This is a topic of debate here, as to how long this takes (generally a few seconds), and whether trying to boot without any cooling is safe (As I said, a lot of boards will auto-shutdown before heat damage occurs, but some won't and can fry your CPU).