A few years ago during a move the flimsy-pegged stock cpu cooler on my intel i7 920 popped partially off the motherboard exposing the cpu. For about a week I used the computer before realizing this had happened. By the time I had realized this I was sure I would need a new cpu. But before shelling out the cash for a new one I decided to see how much longer this one would last. I scraped the brown crusty remnants of thermal paste off of it, popped it back in, installed a cheap cooler master heatsink on top of it and scaled the system up to 3.3GHz from the stock 2.6.
To this day two years later, I am still using that same cpu, still overclocked to 3.3 GHz.
So my question to you guys is:
What is the longest you have had a computer part or piece of electronics last through conditions that you were sure would kill it?
Pentium 4 on lga 775. You can remove the god damn heatsink, play games (at the time I think it was AoE 1). Sure enough the CPU went upto 120c but didn't slow and kept on trooping.
Yes the pentium 4 was a poor performer, but my god was it robust.
The longest thing i owned that was a 'zombie' which had it's CPU cooler not plugged in. It was running off of the stock CPU cooler @ 3.2ghz without a fan for 4 years! TO this day i use it in my home server.
I messed around with and old Athalon 64 I think it was by taking the heatsink off while running games, It would crash, But it would get right back up on its feet and go again LOL
My first build had some of the intel stock fan's plastic pin/nobs broken and the cooler was loose AND without thermal paste. The computer ran at 90 degrees for MONTHS without me noticing
A few years ago I removed the cooler off my Pentium 4 3.2 ghz CPU. Because I was a noob I thought the thermal paste was some kind of residue and I cleaned it off and put the cooler back on. I played a couple of very demanding games the following days (Assassins Creed 1) but my computer sounded like a vacuum cleaner. After researching into the matter I found what that residue was and bought the cheapest thermal paste I could find. After that my PC was more quite then ever. It still works to this day but I retired it.