Back in 2001 Tom's generated a lot of publicity by removing the heatsink from a running processor and making it go 'poof'! Now they have done it again by disabling the HSF on processors while benchmarking . The results are interesting and should probably be read by anyone who is concerned about their processor's health. 

Branded by former experience with the Pentium 4 3.6 GHz (throttling under load due to overheating) and Athlon 1200 processors (product killed in action when fan was removed), we decided to put AMD and Intel low-cost and high-end processors to a special stress test by disconnecting the processor fan in order to simulate a fan failure.

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