I have enough computing power to concurrently run a moon mission, control Heathrow airport, calculate the end of the universe and play several games of chess concurrently..... Alas this needs a CPU cooler of monstrous proportions made of pure copper... which is HEAVY ....
it's mounted sideways on the motherboard and strains on it's retaining clips like a breeze block suspended by spiders thread....
So let me set the scene... I needed to pull out the "beast" to plug a usb connector in for our ink hungry Epson printer.... simple job you would think.... but like most men I over estimate the length of things.... (slight pause for comic effect) .....and pulled the computer too far causing it to bump heavily down when the back end of the computer ran out of computer desk and settled on the wooden floor.....rather loudly....
there was an almighty "CRACK!" as the CPU cooler separated from it's fastenings and my 4 drives all decided that I had exceeded their operating shock (non sinusoidal) limits.... and all recalibrated in unison having completely lost the position they had last left the read/write heads (careless to say the least) .....closely followed by my Quad Core CPU immediately going into thermal meltdown a la three mile island style....ok it didn't melt it's way through the three stories of our house and continue on it's way to the centre of the earth.... but it had a good bash at it... thankfully AMD have engineered their CPU's to become a little bit suspicious about temperatures above 86c and they immediately disconnect power to prevent thermal runaway.....
However I was left with a broken CPU cooler bracket and a motherboard manufacturer which had closed it's doors in 2009 (Abit) so after a few phone calls to a local PC supplier of whom I've been friends with for years......I had secured another clip off a dead motherboard !!! yay!!
or so I thought.... it seems now that the CPU is a "bit" brain damaged in that no matter how fast the CPU fan runs (currently nearly 4000rpm and sucking the air out of the room as I speak) the CPU will, if stressed above 90% peak at over 90c which is pretty bad for this particular CPU because it's rated at 86c max temperature..... :(
So as a stop gap until I can get hold of replacements I have cut off the thermistor which controls the fan speed and it's running like a Spitfire engine at full tilt in a dive towards a group of Heinkel bombers over London .....which makes playing music different as the wind whistling past your ears and almost ripping your socks off as a veritable mini tornado under my desk pulls anything within 4 metres towards the computer air intake.... does detract somewhat ...... just a tad .....from the quieter moments of Pink Floyd's "The Wall"
I will have to cancel the next moon mission and cut down my parallel chess games to just one....Heathrow will have to wait on a holding pattern until I can fix the problem......
Gravity sucks ......
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