Re: Linux vs Windows temperature anomaly

Ed Sweetman
2003-03-06T00:18:33Z

Russell King wrote:
> On Thu, Mar 06, 2003 at 10:38:44AM +1100, Con Kolivas wrote:
>
>>On Thu, 6 Mar 2003 10:11 am, Herman Oosthuysen wrote:
>>
>>>Linux is more 'busy' than windoze and I have heard of boxes frying when
>>>running Linux. The solution is to find a better motherboard
>>>manufacturer...
>>
>>That doesn't make sense. His post said the temperature was 20 degrees lower
>>when it failed.
>
>
> It makes perfect sense. Components drawing power produce heat, which
> causes a temperature rise above ambient. Put simply, if a chip that
> fails at a case temperature of 50C and you have a 10C rise, it'll fail
> at 40C. If you have a 20C rise, it'll fail at 30C.
>
> PS, the efficiency of heatsinks is measured in degC/W - how many degrees
> celcius the temperature rises for each watt of power dissipated. Double
> the dissipated power, double the temperature rise.
>

that doesn't make much sense.

a chip for a given power output fails at a certain chip temperature,
this temperature doesn't vary by the case temp. If the case temp
increases then the chip temp will increase as long as the cooling system
on the chip doesn't change. Hence if the case temp increases the chip
temperature will increase and that could put it into the range of
failure. If the case temp decreases then the chip temp decreases.

The behavior you describe is when you increase the power output of a
chip beyond normal specifications (overclocking) then the temperature of
failure is lowered. eg. A chip that would run normally at 50C now can
only run stable at 45-40.

chip temp sensors are usually located in a relatively cool area of the
chip, hence chip failure temps occur usually around 60C (max) when in
fact it's around 80-90C. Unfortunately for us, chip temperature is not
uniform across the chip.

Here is a nice little site to get some info on that stuff.
http://users.erols.com/chare/elec.htm

that being said.
I've never heard of running linux frying someone's cpu. I could see
frying a power supply because cheap power supplies will fail after a
while of idle/load cycles that linux is good at using. I really dont see
how else linux could be more "busy" than winows especially since windows
has 5 or 6 spyware ad programs running behind the scenes all the time
anyway and the virus scanner having to check every instruction would
definitly lead to a higher cpu average than a linux box ding the same
things minus the spyware and virus scanner. It just doesn't make any
sense. Erroring out more in linux than windows...possibly yes depending
on which version but not hardware damage under normal use.