Lakedude... the AMD heat issue has been well known since the beginning. Every time AMD released a processor that stomped an Intel equivalent, every single Intel troll would run to the one weakness of the Athlon - thermal protection.
They would say something like - "Well yeah... I paid 3 times as much as you did, my performance is 30% worse, and if I wanna upgrade my memory I have to upgrade more than one module, but at least my cpu is running a few degrees cooler! Ah hah hah!"
This is a "duh" article. Nobody is getting their eyes opened by this, and nobody would expect anything different from the outcome. P4 has thermal protection against catastrophic heatsink failure, the Athlon does not. This is more like an exasperation article from Dr. Pabst - he feels maybe an article like this will encourage AMD to work faster and harder on thermal protection. Do I agree that AMD needs to work on thermal protection? Yes... but that doesn't mean their one weakness counteracts all their strengths. I've built 7 Athlon systems for other people, and I have a Duron and a Tbird sitting here. The heatsinks have ranged from the retail POS that ships with the processors, to an old OCZ Monster II heatsink to a beautiful Swiftech. I have yet to chip or crack a core, and none of these systems have had heat problems.... even the overclocked ones. The guy who introduced me to AMD 9 or 10 months also builds computers for his friends/family - all AMD, and none have had heat problems. People I know at the LAN's I attend are fairly split between AMD and Intel, but all the AMD people I know don't have heat problems. I know only one person who has fried a tbird, and that was because he used some funky heatsink retension method that caused the heatsink not to lie perfectly flat on the processor. Fortunately he got it replaced, as it was under warranty, but burning the tbird was his own stupidity.
As far as a heatsink falling off... the only time I've EVER heard of a heatsink coming off was when one of my gaming clan buddies purchased a new 1ghz PIII system from some company. It was shipped to him by UPS, and lo and behold, the box was halfway shredded, and the computer within was filled with broken shards of silicon and transistors and whatnot. The Heatsink came off... and it took a large chunk of the motherboard with it - at which point it rolled around in the computer like a metal chunk of component death.
But rest assured... the moment my heatsink falls off and my processor dies, I will run screaming to this forum to tell you all about it.
"Laziness is a talent to be cultivated like any other" - Walter Slovotsky
Yummy!! 
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