I bumped into my PC early this morning, and it took me 12 hours to realize that 3 out of 4 RAM sticks were chilling on top of my graphics card... together with the CPU cooler.

I'm not sure whether I should be amazed that it kept running (with a few random reboots) with just a crusty chunk of thermal paste as a cooling block, or worried about how fried my hardware is now.

Hm. How?

Have you bumped into it with a car? A CPU cooler should be screwed in and those RAM holders are nothing to be trifled with.

@msdsk @AtuM @IntrusionCM

AMD (1st gen Ryzen 7) machine indeed. Issue with AMD is that a heavy air cooler can snap the plastic bracket if it swings back and forth too much.

Also, not a car, but I dropped a wooden crate with 11 bottles of tawny port on top of it. Luckily the booze survived.

As to why I didn't immediately inspect my PC: There are 11 bottles in the crate, not 12.

@AtuM *rolls eyes*

@bittersweet oh lord...

That explains a lot.

Isn't the plastic thingy dependent on the manufacturer? Pretty sure that my Noctua has no plastic....

But good that no liquid came in. It's one hell of a mess to clean up :(

(Yeah. Speaking from experience. )

Did you never check any kind of task manager when experiencing random reboots?

@AtuM usually it's the mainboard which is at fault...

CPUs should shutdown after a certain temperature.

The AMD coolers and the Intel stock coolers were crap tastic, yes. I dunno if it was worse when Phenom was alive, but it has been always solid advice imho to never rely on either a cheap PSU or the default cooler.

I still have PTSD from the fuckity fuck plastic nibbles you had to press through and turn to fixate the CPU coolers...

Wraith got better.... But still. Buy a damn cooler and new paste, it's worth it.

Only in graphics cards I must say that NVIDIA is especially famous for turning to charcoal.

AMD wasn't always good either, but they never got that famous.

*screeching hissing noises* that shit was no fun.

@bittersweet If a heavy air cooler keeps using these plastic hinges that are not meant for such use, then the cooler is cheap, misdesigned crap.

My Scythe Mugen 5 has a mounting frame to replace that plastic stuff and uses the original metal backplate of the mobo for backside support.

@AtuM AMD frying CPUs was an issue in the Thunderbird era, but that was 20 years ago, and Athlon64 and later do have thermal protection.

@AtuM I just replaced the single 1200RPM fan on my CPU cooler with two 800RPM ones in push-pull configuration. Not only it is even more silent, it's also only 41°C at sustained full CPU load while it was 45°C before. As added bonus, I will still have cooling even if one fan fails.

@AtuM Sure, I have a 140mm front-low and a 120mm rear-high fan as per the ATX standard design, plus one in the PSU which usually doesn't kick in. ^^

CPUs (and GPUs) are generally very difficult to actually overheat (per their own design limits).

They will throttle down to a fraction of thier standard base clock to prevent overheating and eventually shut down to prevent damage.

I once reinstalled my AiO and accidentally reversed the fan headers (the pump was set to PWM and radiator fan was locked to 100%).

The computer worked fine for a while until the water hit thermal capacity and then it just kept slowing down (manifesting as micro stutters in UI and games).

At the same time, the PWM controller finally provided just enough voltage for the pump to spin up and move the water around a bit.

Once temps dropped the pump stopped and the stutters returned. Was a nightmare to diagnose.

@IntrusionCM fuck those coolers.

In the last year I rebuilt a legacy XP system with parts I had laying around in my bin. I swapped the CPU out for a faster one and when reinstalling the fan the mounting bracket broke.

No big deal, it's like 20 years old anyway, just ordered a new one.

I get it, install it, breaks again.

I ended up making my own bracket out of aluminum and some 8cm bolts and washers.

Still running right now actually.