I almost hate to admit I was so stupid, but this is also a teaching moment.
Building my friend's new PC (same parts as mine except we went with a cheaper 2TB Samsung Evo 970 SSD instead of the really expensive Sabrent Rocket PCie 4 Plus in mine. Yeah mine is nearly twice as fast, but at 3500 MB/s, his is no slouch and half the cost.
ANYWAY, I've got it setup on the bench, outside of the case, and doing stability and temperature tests. Everything has been working fine. Temps were okay under normal desktop use while I was installing Windows.
Then I fired up Prime95 to heat stress the CPU, and it IMMEDIATELY shot up from normal idle temp of around 37C to 90C (which is the point where throttle limiting kicks in to protect the chip). Now, from testing my own rig, I know that running Prime95 using all cores, my PC will top out around 85C, but it'll be slow to get there, and mine is in a case. This rig sitting on the bench should not have heated up that quick.
Pulled the cooler off to see if everything was seated properly, and low and behold... I had left the clear plastic film attached to the bottom of the heatsink, THAT YOU'RE SUPPOSED TO PEEL OFF BEFORE MOUNTING.
ARGH!!!!
Always TEST, and if something doesn't look right, find out why. If someone just slapped that together without actually running stress tests, and gave it to a customer, they'd never know why their performance sucked. The CPU would work fine, and just throttle back when it got hot.
Also, goes to show you, it's really impossible to hurt a modern CPU with heat - it will literally throttle itself down to a crawl and finally just turn off the system, in order to save itself.
Same for GPUs. Jayz has a video he posted last year, where he purposely bakes a GTX 2080 with a hot air gun, and the fans unplugged, until the card throttles itself clock down to 300 Mhz, and yet it continues running the benchmark and never crashes.
DOH!!!!!!! I'm an idiot.
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DOH!!!!!!! I'm an idiot.
Christians warn us about the anti-christ for 2,000 years, and when he shows up, they buy a bible from him.
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Re: DOH!!!!!!! I'm an idiot.
LOL - I did the same when I was fixing my Dell E6540 laptop that has 2 videos - one is the Intel and the other is the AMD. Around the AMD chip are 4 integrated circuits that also touch the heat pipe. On the heat pipe are 2 pieces of thermal pads. The thermal pads have a clear plastic cover to protect the sticky stuff that touches the heat sink and the IC's. I forgot to pull it off on one side that touches the heat pipe, so the IC's retained their heat.