I made a fan overvolt on a old dell once by messing with something trivial cant remember mind. The fan was for the processor and well things got toasty. And the laptop went to .gg trying to remember what I did it was software level with Ubuntu as well. grabs brain
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I am kind of all for this, for education and cautionary reasons, with the caveat of you write up in excruciating detail how they did it.
If anything does happen it will be a hell of a wrote up. More and more I am thinking that this should be a thing that is made widely aware of, get everyone actively trying to break and permenantly destroy laptop hardware. This come with oversight and work and if it is something so easy as DD all zeros, or edid flashing or GPU flashing that has to be reversed and continue the experiment.
Edit: to condense. Not what if is the worst, but definitely find the worst.
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Thanks for the input, that really gave me the motivation to setup a computer just for the purpose of trying to destroy it. I am a student and I can’t afford to just blowing computers at will, but it may be worth it. Monitoring accounts and their console inputs and isolating the computer from my internal network are some challenges that I will look into.
And I also found out that the computer does not support virtualization. Oh well…
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That was not a direct thing for you specifically to do it, but it sounds like a fun and educational thing to do for the benefit of the wider internet.
Do not go outright risking the hardware just for this as it is wasteful if it is not expendable, But the idea is cool. I have absolutely no clue if it is possible to physically damage the laptop through OS access, so I cannot in good conscious recommend you actually do it.
But if you do, try to make it in such a way that you get something of value back that can be used else where and maybe get some attention. Like as a project, or get a really old junk laptop form goodwill or something expendable, or put it forward to the school as a sponsor me some old hardware type deal.
If you do do it put some thought into the safety of it as batteries can be pretty scary, a desktop would be safer on that front, or if the laptop can run without the battery (another reason to get old junk they usually have removeable batteries) try to do that instead, the hardware is still at risk but they tend to die undramatically where as a battery can cause a fire.
I am not sure if there is a way to externally log whats happening in the OS but that would give you complete information of what is/was happening should it actually take it out.
It is a pretty cool idea.
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If you could manage to mess with clock rate on the voltage controller, it may be possible to cause voltage spikes.
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Which will fries the vrm first and not kill the cpu
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Yeah… Either way results in a fried PC ready for scrap 
Would have to check spec sheet. First off, low switching frequency will reduce switching losses. So it will run less hot. At the currents the MOSFETs can handle, the traces from the inductor to the CPU would go up in smoke before anything else.
I seriously hope this isn’t a controller for a water treatment facility.
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Oh no, not like back in the day. You still have the monitor psu get to full load, but eventually it melts / catches fire.
Ooh, I just found a fun way to screw things up, though it seems most ram is going to have some kind of write protection implemented.
@wendell This seems like something you’d appreciate.
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Toss it in a hillbilly trash fire 
Maybe the hypothetical attacker can use flashrom to flash the BIOS/UEFI to something less useful. If they’re doing it right on supported hardware, you’ll need an external SPI flasher to recover.
Make sure to setup external logging.
And please, for the sake of everybody in the internet, make sure the computer is properly isolated from the internet. Just “behind a NAT” won’t suffice - You’ll be taking part in scams, port scans and oh damns in no time. PLEASE DON’T. Make sure you’ve got another computer acting as firewall, and monitor that computer’s traffic as well. There is enough spam, botnets etc. on the internet already.
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This is something that I really have to do. It’s beyond my skills and time right now with college stuff, but it will be done