Running with no cooler help

[Corasik]

Even P3's had thermal protection, although it was less advanced than P4's throttling it still protected the chip. At a certain temp (I believe around 120 degrees, but not 100% sure) it simply puts the cpu into "sleep mode" crashing the computer, but protecting the CPU.

Pretty sure that all P4's include two later protection, firstly the throttling which can be partially ignored/adjusted based on bios settings, and secondly an emergency "halt" mode which like the P3's protection shuts down the CPU in the event the gracefull throttle didnt work.

 

[jas72]

so the moral is if you are thick as two planks and don't know how to mount a cooler buy INTEL

 

[Rroff]

a friend of mine kept running a P4 @ 100 deg. cel. for months. She would keep telling me: "my PC is constantly freezing and crashing" So once I went check it out for her, and found the CPU fan stuck lol, and the temperature @ 105 degrees It still works fine to this day, all I did was touch the fan et voila, everything was fine

So new or not, as long as it's Intel, it shouldn't burn. Old AMD's used to burn since their thermal throttling mechanism was slow and wouldn't react fast enough to shut down the processor.

Forgot I used to set the BIOS to 90C thermal cut off - so I guess the CPU halt is at a higher temp...

All P4s have some form of throttling if i remember right. I know for a fact a mates P4 1.5 used to throttle down to 750 or so under load when he tried to cool it passively, he called me in one day asking why it was so slow..

As for the OP, running without TIM or a heatsink would lead to an unstable PC at best.

Yeah they all have some thermal management - but the throttling wasn't very sophisticated and would do little to really manage high temps.

 

[Ravane]

I tried this once and the CPU socket started smoking in about 5 seconds. Quickly turned the PC off & thankfully the CPU itself wasn't harmed, though the board looked a little black/scorched.