• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

Running with no cooler help

Pen66

Pen66

Pen66

Associate
Joined
1 Oct 2007
Posts
1,088
I've got an old "tiny" branded tower with a 1.5GHz Pentium 4 CPU. I recently removed the cooling fan to remove years of dust & dirt build up.

I have no thermal paste to reattach the cooler.

Is it ok to run without the cooler for a limited time (nothing intensive)?
 
Ive heard people use toothpaste as thermal paste very temporarily if you want to be extreme/risk it :D. It seems to dissapear after approx 2 weeks use but as a stop gap its worth a try I suppose. Just make sure u keep an eye on temps and that they dont exceed 60c, put speedfan into your startup folder or something!
 
I believe temps will be reasonable with a cooler attached but without thermal paste. Not great obviously, but hardly fatal
 
P4's have some of the best thermal management of any processor. It will declock itself to ultra low, and be completely unusable (with no cooler at all). But with the cooler on without paste it will probably run full speed, just get close to the throttle point under heavy load.
 
Those old P4s won't throttle down and stay running without a heatsink... in very rare cases they may go up in smoke but most likely outcome is they will hit 90-100C before you finish loading windows causing them to invoke thermal cut out.

In rare cases tho they can heat up so fast they don't have time to gracefully thermal manage and toast themselves.
 
Rroff said:
Those old P4s won't throttle down and stay running without a heatsink... in very rare cases they may go up in smoke but most likely outcome is they will hit 90-100C before you finish loading windows causing them to invoke thermal cut out.

In rare cases tho they can heat up so fast they don't have time to gracefully thermal manage and toast themselves.
Click to expand...

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 :D It still works fine to this day, all I did was touch the fan et voila, everything was fine :P

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.
 
Rroff said:
Those old P4s won't throttle down and stay running without a heatsink... in very rare cases they may go up in smoke but most likely outcome is they will hit 90-100C before you finish loading windows causing them to invoke thermal cut out.

In rare cases tho they can heat up so fast they don't have time to gracefully thermal manage and toast themselves.
Click to expand...

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.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom