On 13/06/2010 7:43 AM, root 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?

TIA

I have a fanless NVIDIA based graphics card that I was running with
inadequate ventilation. When used on graphics intensive tasks, it
started behaving as if there was increasing fog in the scene being
viewed. This would have reduced the amount of processing it needed to
do. The GPU didn't fail, and this effect was apparently invisible to the
software driving it. I infer that it was a designed response to excess
temperature.

A fan cooled version with a failing fan would presumably do the same thing.

Sylvia.