Can you run with no heatsink on cpu?

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khaz

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Jan 11, 2007
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Ok, here's the scenario. I've got an e6600 going into a Gigabyte DQ6 with watercooling. The mobo is on a UPS truck now. The DQ6 board has to be prepped for watercooling, namely pulling the Crazycool off the back to mount the adapter. The case is ready to go - loop is done, wiring is done, drives are in, etc. Basically I had built the system then had to RMA the mobo.

Given that experience, it is certainly feasible that the next DQ6 is bad and I'm leery about possibly voiding the warranty by popping off the Crazycool. Is it possible to plug the mobo to see if its ok before hooking up the plumbing? IE run bare on the cpu for some period of time w/ no damage resulting.

If it is, how long do you dare run? Just long enough to see it post or could you poke around in the bios for a bit? I'm not talking about getting to windows or otherwise loading the cpu. This setup has a RAID so getting to bios could take a minute.
 
HotFoot

HotFoot

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You don't have a boxed cooler? These things take no time at all to snap in and out. Maybe you could borrow a friend's cooler for a couple hours and do some testing of your mobo.

The crazycool backplate, while novel, is the dumbest thing on the DQ6. How many people does Gigabyte expect to buy this board and match it with a cooler that doesn't require a more sophisticated mount?
 
cdonato

cdonato

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You could, but I would guess after about 5 mins youd fry the processor & then void the warranty because you ran it without a sink & fan. So unless you are completely nuts banish that thought from your mind.

Run it on stock cooling for a while & see whats up, then worry about setting up wour plumbing
 
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MarkG

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Certainly the 486 in my laptop didn't have a heatsink, and I believe it was a desktop chip rather than a low-power version... it was from some cheapskate Taiwanese company that even most computer stores in Taipei didn't recognise when I was trying to upgrade the RAM.
 
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srgess

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Dont do it, i had a Duron 1200 like couple year ago and i was wondering this too, what happen when we dont put a heatink on the cpu, i powered the system, 5-10 second after the system shutdown and i saw some little smoke come out of the cpu. I wanted the athlon XP. I told my dad cpu was done and its time to get the new Athlon XP.
 
everett

everett

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Cool video, i have seen one kinda like that somewhere(I'll see if i can find it)Maybe khaz can put his on video and we will all see what an e6600 will do?
 
ZozZoz

ZozZoz

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I remember some guy's webpage that I saw a while ago. he ran one of the first athlon 64s with no heatsink, downclocked and with lowered voltage
 
capnbfg

capnbfg

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While it's a bad idea to intentionally run the CPU without a heatsink because of the unnecessary risk of frying it, the likelihood of it actually frying is extremely low. The figures given above about 10 to 30 seconds before it dies are both misinformed and misleading. Both AMD and Intel have implemented thermal protection circuitry these days, and the CPU will simply throttle down and turn off. This is only true for newer processors though, not K7 and earlier or P3 and earlier (to the best of my knowledge). In all honesty, it's not worth it to run without a heatsink because your system will shut down in under a minute and you won't be able to do anything productive.

I say this all with confidence because I have run my AthlonX2 without a heatsink (by accident of course). I was messing around with some BIOS settings when I heard a loud thump. At first I thought something fell behind my bed, so I just kept working until suddenly the system because unresponsive. I immediately shut it down and removed the side panel, at which point I discovered that my clip-on heatsink (Arctic Cooling Freezer 64) had ripped one side off of the plastic mounting bracket and fallen onto my video card. The CPU was hot, but not painful to touch, and the CPU had run without the heatsink for about 30 seconds before halting. This same CPU is still 100% stable and overclocks wonderfully.
 
BaldEagle

BaldEagle

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Never turn it on without a heatsink the chip will burn in seconds as there is almost no heat capacity in the chip. The heat spreader has some heat capacity but that isn't going to last more than 30 seconds before you burn the chip. :x
 
BaldEagle

BaldEagle

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Thats like not putting your seatbelt on because the airbag will deploy and save you when you get hit. The purpose of the internal thermal protection is if there is a failure of the cooling system (yes, falling off would definitely be a failure) or overload of the processor. Your going to tell this guy just because of a bunch of fried Thunderbirds AMD and intel put in thermal protection to keep you from cooking your chip so go ahead see if you can smoke that $300 chip or if it saves itself. DO YOU FEEL LUCKY PUNK
 
capnbfg

capnbfg

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Now try actually reading my post. Although I dicounted the numbers that people gave (simply because that information is fabricated), in the end I still recommended that he not do it.

For the record, I always wear a seatbelt 8)
 
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