Originally Posted By: sslechta
Those CPUs will cost you.


Back 20 years ago the law firm I was at for a few years ran rack mounted servers that had dual core Zenon CPUs. They bought like 25 of those servers at one time and the team doing the installs opened a few to look at them assuming that if 3 or 4 were okay, they would all be okay. Well, maybe not. On one of them the heat sink came loose during shipping, but the server room was so loud we didn't hear it banging around in the case. We powered them up one at a time, and that one was like 23rd in line, so we powered those last few up almost at the same time and walked out to let them run for an hour. In about 6 minutes we heard an alarm and went in to find that one server freaking out from heat. I sweat you could have cooked on that CPU. And THEN we had to hear about it from the bosses about why we didn't inspect EVERY one before powering them up. (And they were right, We were just being lazy.) Fortunately they had thermal protection so the thing shut down when it got to the same temperature as the SUN and the CPU didn't burn up, but wow, that was a lesson. Those Zenon's at the time were so expensive they required a mortgage and they would have been perfectly right to make us pay for the replacement. Remember, we couldn't prove the heat sink came off in shipping because we didn't inspect anything. (Though of course would could have lied... but that's not me. And the largest law firm in Ohio doesn't lie.)