That is quite possibly the dumbest thing i have read on here. A cpu can fry itself in seconds, not even enough time to go into bios and make sure you set a shutdown temperature.

1. Cpu Heatsink And Fan

Its really not that time consuming to put on a heatsink/fan. Todays processors create so much waste heat that it will only take a few seconds for it to go into thermal shut down. Running a CPU without a fan and heatsink is a sure fire way to fry your CPU and when it's fried you can argue with Intel all you want but they aren't going to replace it. 'No you can't. If you don't know if your parts are compatible, you need to do more research.' I got it from the source and they don't care to say if it is compatible or not - The source happens to be Intel technical support team!

Cpu Heatsink And Fan

Who else do you want me to contact? I am doing the research right now by buying the processor and trying it out! Post the part number on here, it should say what it is on the box.

If you know the make and model of your motherboard, we'll be able to tell you if they are compatible. Small Form Factor (2x3) with Intel Q45 and ICH10DO chipset Supports Intel Core™ 2 Duo processor with 2MB, 3MB, 4MB or 6MB L2 cache Supports Intel Core™ 2 Quad processor with 6MB or 12MB L2 cache Supports Intel Celeron® processor with 512KB L2 Cache Supports Intel Celeron® Dual Core processor with 512KB L2 cache Supports Intel Pentium® Dual Core processor with 1MB or 2MB L2 cache So yes it'll work if the lenovo info is correct. I think it will too! Thanks for your help. I now have to decide if I want to shellout $350! The truth is I don't need it; but would love to have it because it was something that I wanted to have years back. I ponder it tonight and decide upon it in the afternoon.

If you just want to test if the motherboard and processor is working, YES you can do that without the heatsink and fan but I suggest you only do it less than a minute. Second, you would be halted even before the BIOS page because the motherboard will automatically detect if you plugged the CPU FAN in the header, it won't proceed if you don't plug that in there but you can turn the system on and reach that warning I disagree compleatly.

I would never apply power to a computer without the fan/heasink in place, PERIOD, not for less than a nimute or a few seconds. It doesn't take a minute for a CPU to overheat and possibly damage the chip; it only takes a few seconds.

Like I said I would never power on a computer without the fan/heatsink in place, end of story. I disagree compleatly.

I would never apply power to a computer without the fan/heasink in place, PERIOD, not for less than a nimute or a few seconds. It doesn't take a minute for a CPU to overheat and possibly damage the chip; it only takes a few seconds. Like I said I would never power on a computer without the fan/heatsink in place, end of story.

CPUs generate a lot of heat quickly! It would be efficient to figure some way to use this heat productively! Some future Edison will figure it out; I sure!

It doesn't take an edison to figure out that heated water = steam = moves electrical generators - electricity - powering computer - inefficient power lines - heat - err wait. What were we talking about again? The amount of thermal energy required to build up enough steam pressure to spin a turbine is immense. The internal temperatures of boilers reach hundreds of degrees centigrade and the pressure reaches hundreds of PSI. There's no efficient way to condense heat that doesn't involve wasting more energy in the process, so the small amount of thermal energy produced by a CPU would be useless unless it is allowed to build up to the point where it damages the CPU.

The amount of thermal energy required to build up enough steam pressure to spin a turbine is immense. The internal temperatures of boilers reach hundreds of degrees centigrade and the pressure reaches hundreds of PSI.

There's no efficient way to condense heat that doesn't involve wasting more energy in the process, so the small amount of thermal energy produced by a CPU would be useless unless it is allowed to build up to the point where it damages the CPU. I would think that people would get that I was joking about that especially with the smiley face and the mentioning of power lines. ^generating electricity 101 right there.

The two heatsinks on the Mac Pro aren’t interchangeable, so keep track of which one came from where and don’t try to force their installation if they don’t fit properly. After we completed the swap, we powered the machine on and were met with the worst sound: fans that didn’t spin down. The Mac Pro refused to POST and forcing it to turn off revealed a CPU A Temperature Overheat warning LED on the motherboard. Removing the CPUA heatsink revealed the problem: uh-oh CPUB was fine, but CPUA was far from it. While there are no pins to bend/break on these LGA CPUs, if anything goes wrong the socket is toast. In this case, both the socket and CPU were beyond saving.

To date I’m not sure what went wrong, but I have two theories. Unlike desktop Nehalem motherboards, there is no clamp that holds the CPU in place. There’s a chance that during the heatsink installation that the CPU moved slightly and shorted as soon as it got power. The other theory is that I somehow over tightened the heatsink on CPUA.

Remember, the chips I used had heat spreaders, the ones they were replacing did not. The added thickness of the heat spreader could have helped push the CPU too hard against the pins in the socket, causing some of them to move out of place. Regardless of the how, what remained was that I now had a dead Xeon and a dead Mac Pro processor board on my hands.

The CPU I could always replace from my stash, but I don’t keep many Nehalem Mac Pro processor boards in my parts closet. This would require a trip to the Apple store.

And if you’ve ever walked into an Apple store holding a Nehalem Mac Pro processor board, you’ll get some looks. Thankfully, the folks at the Crabtree Valley Mall Apple Store in Raleigh, NC are AnandTech readers and quickly understood what had happened. They ordered the replacement part and I waited. If you’re curious, it’ll cost a bit under $400 to replace the processor board in an 8-core Mac Pro provided you allow Apple to keep your dead board. The new board and its accessories It’s been years since I’ve killed a processor and this would be my first LGA socket death, so I was admittedly nervous once I had the new board in hand. I went in and tried to replace the chips again, this time under tightening all of the hex screws on the heatsinks just to be safe. I mounted and dismounted each heatsink three times before committing to the install.

Nervously, I hit the power button. I had good news and bad news.

The bad news, the fans were spinning at full speed. The good news?

The upgrade worked. Initially I didn’t tighten the heatsinks enough so some of the memory channels weren’t working, but a couple more spins of the hex key and I was in business. The fans spinning at full speed were caused by the thermal sensor on one of the heatsinks being dead.

It looks like it died when the first CPU shorted out. The folks at the Apple store had to order me a replacement heatsink as well. After the smoke cleared and my embarrassment subsided, I had an upgraded Nehalem Mac Pro. I started with a pair of 2.26GHz Xeon E5520s and ended up with a pair of 2.93GHz Xeon X5570s. Gaining access to the processors is far easier than the previous generation Mac Pro, but you have to exhibit more care in physically replacing them. The fact that the CPUs I used had integrated heat spreaders hasn’t caused any problems either.

Temperatures are well within reasonable limits, the fans are just as quiet as before and Turbo mode still works. Thursday, July 30, 2009 - If you’ve read our Nehalem articles you’ll know that each chip has three 64-bit wide memory controllers, thus you’ll want to install DIMMs in triplets. You can install four DIMMs, but accessing memory in the fourth module will be slower - something you’ll never notice if you’re wondering.??? This is hindering me from buying a 4 channel UD3R X58 board.

My main goal of an i7 build is for editing AVCHD files through Premiere Pro CS4. Being that tri channel will get me 6g and PP CS4 likes more memory, will adding memory to the 4th module screw things up?. Tuesday, July 28, 2009 - Man, take your hackysack and go buy some laundry soap to clean the crap out of your drawers! You guy's talk about a couple thousand dollars like it's buying a damn house or some huge purchase LOL! Macs are really cost efficient and yes.

PC's are cheaper but who gives a damn! If you want to be cheap. Hackintoshes (LOL) are just that. A POS and your getting what you pay for! You cheap asses probably hit your ol' ladies up for gas money to get to work hehe.

Tuesday, July 21, 2009 - wander over to the egg and buy a lian li. No flashy lights really, no idiot clear side panels. For some reason the hard drive access light and the power light are different colors on mine though. You can get a combo case with a seasonic 550W power supply with it. I put a phenom II x4 3.2Ghz 16 Gigs of RAM and a 1 Gig 4870 in there with aftermarket cooling all around (air not liquid) and it cost me 900 bucks - all from the egg. If you think you're going to find performance arbitrage basically anywhere in the market you couldn't be wrong-er.

Just pick your price/performance point and stick to it. Thanks for the awesome reviews as usual Anand!. Monday, July 20, 2009 - Everybody talks about how expensive the Mac Pro is, but, has somebody compared with other brands?

Look at this: I customize two Dell Precision Workstations with the same components as the base configurations Apple offers for the Mac Pro. The results!! Mac Pro Quad-Core: $2,499.00 Dell Precision T5500: $3,427 Mac Pro 8-Core: $3,299.00 Dell Precision T7500: $3,427 BOTH APPLE OFFERS ARE BETTER!!!!!

Both with the same processors, same amounts of memory at the same speed. The only difference is instead of a NVIDIA GeForce GT 120 with 512MB you get a 256MB NVIDIA® Quadro® NVS 295. And that Dell options have hard drives with less capacity, 500GB vs 640GB. I also added the second Gigabit Ethernet card to both Dells. Dell has no bluetooth option and you may need to add a sound card to them. Remember, you get a more expensive PC with windows Vista and an ugly chasis.