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I'm not hardware expert at all (by any manner or means, believe me!), so this came as a bit of a shock to me.
I was at home last night, downloading some personal emails when all of a sudden there was a load snapping sound and my machine died. At first I thought it was a fuse or a power surge, but the (surge-protected) plug board was still showing OK and eveything else was still on.
So I unplugged it all and opened up my machine to see what was up (trying to ignore the strong odour of burning! I'm an optimist at heart!)... Off came the side and there was my cooling unit hanging off the motherboard by it's power cable.
It looks like the processor (AMD Athlon 1GHz) overheated and melted the cement that holds the cooling unit to it...
Has anyone else ever experienced this? Am I going to be lucky enough that my processor was undamaged? Or is it going to be one of those weeks (considering I spilled my industrial size mug of coffee all over my desk already this morning!)?
regarding what could have caused it, it sounds like the CPU gave up the ghost (it happens).
(Please feel free to sticky me, if you'd rather not post the details)
The heatsink isn't held on by 'cement', it's held on by a large metal clip which attaches to the CPU socket. The goo you see on the CPU and heatsink is to aid thermal transfer, and is normally non-adhesive in this application.
I suspect that your heatsink came unclipped and fell off, which would cause your CPU to burn up pretty much instantly.
Before you shell out for a compatible CPU, check the mounting lugs on the CPU socket to make sure it wasn't those which broke. If the socket is damaged, it's new motherboard time as well :-(
Cheers!
