CPU overheat and shutdown

[Naticus]

I'm hoping you all can ease my mind a bit. I just built my first system and everything was going fine. Then everything started getting slower and slower until the computer powered down. I tried to bring it back up and it wouldn't boot. I waited a bit and then tried it again. It booted this time and upon inspection, I could see the CPU fan was not running. I didn't adjust the cpu fan power cable after install. It was tightly wound around the outside of the fan and was preventing the fan from spinning. I then unwound the power cable tied it out of the way of the fan and now the fan works properly.

This was the first and only time the CPU overheated. The system is running fine now but I worry that I may have done permanent damage to the processor. It is an intel core i7-2600. Are they designed to shut down in the event of overheating to protect them from damage? Should I stop freaking out about this???

 

[inanition02]

They are designed to protect themselves from thermal damage in such cases - you should be fine. You can generally only really blow up CPUs through overclocking or extreme circumstances.

 

[kilo_17]

It's called throttling, if your chip starts getting too hot, it slows itself down as a protection measure, and when it gets hot enough, it powers down. Your chip should be fine, it should kill the power before it gets damaged, and it did.