CPU, not sure if it's broken....

JST1963 · August 21, 2020

Hey Linus, and friends,

I am from Belgium and I recently discovered your videos on YouTube and guess what: I love’em. Especially those where you’re messing around, putting PC’s together and not doing it correctly from the first time, or where Mr. Murphy comes looking and things go wrong all the time. No, I’m kiddin’, I do love your YouTube stuff.

Anyway, I have a couple of questions and I think you are the man for the job

About a month an a half ago, I blew up my brand new main computer (I have several, most of them are used for work, yes, I’m a moron, I use my personal equipment for doing some tests for the company….)

The following happened (I’ll keep it short): I wanted to “upgrade” my PC, so I bought a new motherboard (Asus WS X299 Pro/SE) with a state of the art i9-9940X (€ 850 !!!), and 64G of Corsair Vengeance DDR4 RAM. I choose this combination to run VMware ESXi, hence the CPU with the 14 cores). I cooled the CPU with my old water-cooling system (Corsair dual thingie radiator, don’t remember the type, about 6-7 years old I think). I also had my older (not expensive, €350) video board in it. For some reason, all of a sudden, my PC died on me…. When I opened the PC, I saw that the block on my CPU has exploded (plastic shredded) and that some cooling liquid has dripped onto the video board, as well as on my mobo. So, pfff sniff sniff (read: f**k F******K!!!) …. game over (even though I don’t play any games).

My first question now is: I know my motherboard and video board are gone to PC-heaven. But do you think the CPU and memory has suffered from this short circuit? Do you think that, if I buy a new LGA2066 Mobo, that the CPU and DDR4’s will still work?

OK, so, in the meantime I bought me a new motherboard, WS C246M Pro (LGA1151 this time) with an Intel Xeon E-2288. However, this time I did not trust the water-cooling devices anymore, so I went with the Noctua NH-D15S Air Cooler.

To make sure this cooler would do its job, I yanked everything in my BIOS to max, downloaded some free temp program, and ran the famous CineBench R20 rendering test.
I noticed in the temperature program that all cores ran at 100%, all at around 4.7GHz, and the temperature never went over 74°C (165°F). Does this mean that (and here comes my 2^nd question), because of this test, where all cores were running at 100%, near max frequency, that whatever I will do in the future, my CPU will always be cooled properly by the Noctua NH-D15S? (see attached picture)

Thx,

Johan

WorkedPrawn6766 · August 21, 2020

To awnser your first question your cpu might have gotten some bent pins if the cooler actually exploded like audible bang if not then it might of hurt some of the cores but your ram should be fine unless the plastic hit your ram then that might be a problem but apart from that you might need to upgrade your psu in case the psu over heated and overloaded i hope this helps just bare in mind i have never had this happen to me but just from my reasonable amount of knowledge about PC's

I hope it helps you

JST1963 · August 21, 2020

Hi,

First of all, when I took out the CPU, nothing looked wrong. Even with a magnifying glass, everything seems to be OK. Besides, I never heard any bang or other noise when it stopped working. And second, the PSU (Corsair AX860) seems to be OK as well. It's running smoothly in my new system..

So, visually there is nothing wrong with the CPU. I'm only worried that, if I buy a new mobo for it (LGA2066 mobo's easily are more than € 300) and I place my "broken" CPU on it, that I will break my new mobo....

Jhan