On Thu, 15 Oct 2015 23:04:55 -0400, "Robert Green"
wrote:

wrote in message

stuff snipped

Those AMD monsters can be a horse of a totally different color. A few
years ago a customer burned out 3 motherboards - actually BURNED
through the circuit boards. Finally convinced him to go Intel instead
of AMD, even though for a "gamer machine" the AMDs were significantly
faster.

Back in the day when I was building 400mHz clones, the AMD chips would
self-immolate if they lost cooling - i.e. if you booted up without
remembering to reattach the fan.

Intel CPUs of the same vintage merely throttled back the operating speed
when the cooling failed. AMD said it was the motherboard maker's
responsibility to cover "cooling failures" but I found that very
unsatifisying. Those huge coolers of the era could pop off if the machine
was moved roughly and more than one CPU was killed on bootup because of it.
I stopped using AMD based motherboards until they finally relenting and
began building CPUs that didn't incinerate themselves.
Do you mean they have????