I am typing this message right now using a CPU that I thought I had fried. About the end of July I was fooling around with my new oc'ed tbird rig. While doing so, I started up the system without starting the water pump for my watercooling system. Do some stuff, get called away from computer, come back, computer is locked up. Try to reboot, no boot, cut off power to system and touch water block. Not burning hot, but pretty hot nonetheless.
Tear everything down, inspect chip, no visible damage. Put everything back together. System boots ok and boots windows but locks up when anything is clicked on. Try several times at different voltages and settings. No good.
Curse own stupidity. Get new 1.2 tbird. Put in system. All is fine.
Months pass. Checking out retention system on new waterblock. Very trick retention system but its design looks like you could apply enough leverage to fracture your tbird. Take old "fried" cpu out of junk box as a guinea pig. Lather on some thermal compound, apply new waterblock and crank down. Boot up machine just for fun. Boot into windows, click on something, works fine. Run a couple of cycles of Sandra "Burn in." Works fine. Run a few Sandra benchmarks. Works fine.
My apparently "fried" tbird is now seemingly running like a champ. Aside from the unanswerable questions such as how it healed itself, what testing, benchmarks, proggies, etc. should I run to see if this "fried" cpu is OK? I would like to thoroughly test it to see if it really was fried.
BTW, Mr. "Fried" - a 1.2 tbird - is running at 1.4 right now at 1.82 volts and 31 degrees centigrade.
Thanks
