Comment by dave7
7 hours ago
CPUs may run hotter but they have so much more protection. You can even power on and boot a modern Ryzen without even having a heatsink attached and it will not only survive, it will actually go in the BIOS and work for a while! One of these Socket A Athlons would be dead in a microsecond of having pushed the power button if you forgot to put on a heatsink. The Intel PIIIs of the time I believe were one of the first to implement thermal throttling and would crash but probably survive.
and it will not only survive, it will actually go in the BIOS and work for a while!
That's because modern CPUs are thermally limited, so they are essentially designed to stay at their maximum temperature and regulate speed and voltage very quickly in order to achieve that.
I've not had as much experience with AMD CPUs, but have seen several times where the stock Intel cooler's mounting mechanism either wasn't fully latched from the beginning or worked itself loose over time, such that the heatsink was never in contact with the CPU, and the computer continued to operate normally, albeit much slower than it should --- sometimes for years --- with the CPU sitting at its maximum temperature and throttling all the time.