Tried to fry an AMD Opteron 250 - just for kicks

try to over volt it in the bios to as high as it can go, keep the fan off, and OC it to hell until it dies (the voltage should be able to do it)

why are you even happier about your phenom II? different chip different rules i'm afraid -

would you be happy trying the same trick with the phenom? thought not!

I had 486 sx that didnt even need a fan at all, doesnt mean my i7 will do the same trick....

Optys are server based chips. That means they are the better silicon of all of them. Most of them can survive quite a bit.

As for your PII 720, remember its a quad that had a bad core. That means that it might die faster if you did the same thing.

But even if you didn't fry the chip that temp probably could have done some unseen damage. Next thing you know the system will fail.

nothing wrong with Solidworks on an Opteron 260.

i forgot to plug in a fan once, the CPU lived. that one was a 3 GHz P4.

Of course a server based chip is going to take a lot more than a gaming CPU like a Phenom. I'm just iterating my new found respect for AMD. I would never try the same thing with my 720; especially because it's mine. I am very happy with the new Phenom chips' performance and overclocking potential. I would not expect it to take a 100 degree bake. I mean c'mon, at $130 apiece, it doesn't need to be that durable - it's disposable!


It runs okay, but not great. My main gripe is crunching big 3D toolpaths with Mastercam.


I can only hope!  

lol bump the voltage up and see how quick that thing dies. will be lucky if you can even boot into windows.

"It runs okay, but not great. My main gripe is crunching big 3D toolpaths with Mastercam."

Tell me about it....did this over the weekend at work try setting resolution to 300 importing an image 4" x 2.75"( .050 max Z rise ), converting to mastercam surface ( .005 tolerance ), then changing surface to solid ( .005 again ). Dual P4 xeon = 8 hours, Dual Quad Core Xeon HPx6400 = 6 hours. Got insufficient RAM errors in solidworks on all but the 16GB machine just importing the surface in STL format. I'm only using MasterCAM X2 right now and it seems to be limited to only 2 cores for the heavy stuff. I haven't upgraded to X3 yet. I do all my toolpaths in GibbsCAM though, and it sucks at the big 3D stuff too ( also core limited to 2 ). The only advantage I have with all the extra cores, is the ability to run all these programs in the background, but only incremental speed increases.

I’m only running a single Opteron 2.4 Ghz w/ 2gb of slow ram. The only virtue of this machine is the Nvidia Quadro X3500. The graphics card is worth more than the rest of the system combined. High speed toolpath takes forever. So does “break many pieces” with a large cam spline. The new workstations coming in the door here are dual core Xeon w/ Vista 64 and 8gb of DDR2. Still not the best in the world, but a world better than what I have now.

We’re running X3, and from what I’ve been told, there will finally be support for multi-core cpu / multiple cpu systems in X4, which is in beta now. It should be released sometime this summer I’m told. Here’s a link to a “what’s new” vid for X4:
http://www.mastercam.com/Products/Enhancements/X4/X4_wh...

Just out of curiosity, why do you use Gibbs for toolpath and not MCX? Lack of license?

It's just what I'm use too. I only use MasterCAM for the ability to import pictures and translate them to 3D for artsy-fartsy projects. Once you get past all the quircks in Gibbs, it's not bad. I really should learn toolpaths in MasterCAM one of these days too, but I just don't have the time. Not to mention, there are 3 other guys here that program much simpler parts, and they'de never be able to make the switch. Thank's for the link, but I don't use it enough to appreciate most of the new features. Multi-core support would be worth the upgrade to me just by itself.

Yeah, I know what it's like when you're just so used to using one software package - it's tough to switch. I'd been using EdgeCAM for almost 10 years and we recently bought MasterCam X3. MCX is really nice, but sometimes I still use EdgeCAM if I want to get something simple done quick.

GibbsCAM 2009....multi-core and 3D batch toolpath processing....time for an upgrade again....LOL I think I'll try it off a torrent at home with the same project before I shell out the coin though.

A friend of mine does this frequently when he gets his hands on legacy hardware or just simply stuff he dosent want/cant sell (pentium 4s....old athlon xp's). About half the time, the motherboard will die before the chip does.