So, I want to fry my GPU. (Don't ask. [EDIT]Ok, apparently people are suspicious. See my second post below for an explanation.[/EDIT]) I figured I'd just take the heat pipe off and let it do its thing, but the safeties keep kicking in and cutting the power (as in, the machine turns off, not decreases the voltages) before anything useful happens. I'm looking at a GeForce 7600 Go running on some weird HP notebook mobo, with an nForce northbridge labeled "NF-SPP-100-N-A2". I'm not really sure how the safety mechanisms work. Does the mobo monitor the GPU and panic when it gets too hot, or does GPU monitor itself and tell the mobo to shutdown? Googling the problem doesn't really help, since I can't think of search terms that don't just give me a bunch of pages either warning about the dangers of overclocking, or celebrating how the safeties make those dangers mostly a thing of the past.

Any help at all would be appreciated...

Sigh. If only I did have a lifetime warranty...

Here's the story: the laptop fails consistently every 5 months; it's because the cooling system is woefully inadequate. The manufacturer has granted a "partial warranty extension" that basically says, even though my regular warranty is expired*, they'll be willing to fix it if it exhibits certain symptoms, none of which mention overheating directly, but are the result of overheating (like it won't start, etc.). My guess is that this is for reasons of liability. But this time, instead of completely dying, it suffers from horrible, ridiculous video artifacting that makes the computer literally unusable. (You can sorta maybe make out the Windows GUI, but actually reading anything is a no go.) Such video artifacting is not covered under the extension. So here's my problem: the GPU would eventually finish dying and be covered by the warranty if I could keep using the computer, but I can't.

*And yes, I had the same problem fixed twice under my 1-year regular warranty.

well... how big is your toaster?

it not that easy (almost impossible)
they have their secret internal thermal sensors and they automatically under clock to protect themselves even when you remove the heatsink and fan