On Sat, 12 Jun 2010 18:20:19 -0500, AZ Nomad ǝʇoɹʍ:

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.

For the most part decent mainboard provide enough surface area to their
Northbridge chipset and onboard video to be passively cooled. The extreme
end boards offer heatpipes and fancy servo fans.