On Sat, 12 Jun 2010 15:25:58 -0700, Dave Platt wrote:
New motherboards often have a small fan covering one
of the bridge chips. Likewise, expensive graphics
cards have a fan on their processor. These fans
are cheaply made.

Is there protection for the MB/card to keep their
chips from frying if the tiny little fan fails?

On most motherboards built today, there's a temperature sensor
associated with the CPU (sometimes several e.g. individual temperature-
sensing diodes in the CPU's cores) and others on the board. The
sensor values can be read out (often via SMBUS) by the BIOS or other
software.

Better motherboards use three-wire fans with tachometers, where the
tach frequency can be read out of the sensor chip.

I've yet to see a motherboard that did anything with the chipset fan
speed data. You can run an application that'll monitor it, but almost
nobody goes to the bother as most such applications, written for
microsoft windows, were modeled to resemble someting out of a comic
book and are an eyesore even when minimized. Linux' lmsensors doesn't
require such an eyesore on the desktop, but is a bit of a PITA to set
up.

The better motherboards either use a quality fan or a heatpipe to a
heatsink cooled by the cpu fan.