Do Not Forget To Cool Your AMD-CPU

What coronary heart disease is to male Westerners is thermal meltdown to Athlon and Duron processors - it's killer number one. AMD either forgot or didn't care to implement a thermal protection into their latest processors. Unlike Intel, which integrated a thermal diode as well as a CPU-shutdown mechanism in all its processors already several years ago, AMD left this idea aside. What does that mean? If the heat sink is loose or mounted improperly or the fan quits its job the thermal diode integrated in Celeron and Pentium III makes sure that the processor will be turned off when the temperature goes beyond 120°C. In this situation, Athlons and Durons play 'burn-baby-burn' instead. Motherboard makers have now started to implement thermal sensors that are placed underneath the AMD-processors. It is questionable if this can ensure enough safety however, because the Athlon/Duron might already be dead by the time that the thermal sensor has reached shutdown-temperature, due to its distance to the actual processor-die. It is better than no protection at all, however.

Biostar and Luckystar place a spherical thermistor under the CPU.

Soltek uses a heat sensitive foil resistor.

This is not so good! AOpen and MSI think thermal protection is unnecessary. A thermal sensor is missing.