Shiloch Veneficus
Administrator
Joined: 06 Dec 2001
Posts: 1946
Location: All My Base Are Belong to You
|
 Posted: Fri Dec 02, 2005 6:02 am Post subject: |
|
|
That's the tradeoff with AMD vs. Intel. AMD will give you absurdly good numbers. They always benchmark better than Intel, sometimes only by an extremely small margin, but better nonetheless. However, they're still cheaper. Most Intel chips since the P3 have a built-in stepping mechanism that will underclock the processor when it gets too hot. The older P3 version of this underclock I think just shuts the PC down. The P4 version and higher is simply an underclock. It slows the processor down in order for it to cool off (they're built on the assumption you'll at least have a stock heatsink on it). In any case, the mechanism is meant to protect your investment. The processor typically will not melt, even if you pull the heatsink off, and suffer little (if any) damage.
A video demonstrating the effect:
http://www12.tomshardware.com/images/thg_video_1_cpu_cooling.zip |
|
