Mike McCarty wrote:
No, just cheaply designed. There are MANY processors which cannot run GIMPS, for example, because they have "good enough for normal case" cooling designs.
Change the above to read "MANY systems" instead of "MANY processors". As you have noted, it is the bad cooling design that causes the problem...not the processor.
(possibly in the BIOS) *may* be able to slow the CPU down if it exceeds some defined temperature threshold, but that's a cross-your-fingers type of safeguard against a failed cooling system.
You completely missed my point. Dismissing this as "well, your hardware shouldn't do that" is
S-T-U-P-I-D
because, even though it means the hardware is marginal at best, it is a hint that
THERE MAY BE A DEFECT IN THE SOFTWARE.
So, you are saying that if I run the GIMPS torture test and my system overheats then there "may" be a defect in the GIMPS software?
And that should not be ignored.
My point wasn't that his or any CPU *should* be overheated by bad software. My point was that hints that there might be a defect in the software should not be ignored.
I think (hope) you mean *could*.
FWIW, I have a Dual Xeon 2.80GHz system with 2GB of RAM. It runs my DNS server, web server, etc. I also run VMware and normally have at least 2 virtual machines running. One an XP VM the other some variant of Linux. At times I run a RHELv4 team with 4 systems plus the XP. During the day time I limit GIMPS to running on 2 CPUs (hyper-threading enabled) and nice value at 19. At night, a cron job runs and gives GIMPS all 4 CPUs and a negative nice value. On some summer days, since my wife is rather slim, I don't turn on the A/C until the room temp is above 30. My system is on 24/7. Never had a heat issue. But, I do check my fans and dust out the system on a regular basis. Need to do that when you live in Taipei and you have 3 house cats.
Sorry, I don't buy into your theory that overheating may be hinting at "software with defects". IMHO, if that were the case the virus/hackers of the world would be putting out "defective" code with the goal of burning up everyones systems. :-)