A friend was having trouble with his computer crashing whenever it gets heavily loaded. I initially thought it might be overheating, but apparently not. It is giving a MCE, though, which suggests the CPU may be b0rken. A quick Google search says there’s a chance a BIOS upgrade may fix the issue.

All this led me to wonder how my system would deal with heavy loads since being moved to passive cooling. Not so well, as it turns out. The CPU temperature got up to 90°C before I turned up the case fan. After that it went down to around 67°C. I’ve now limited the CPU to 1.8GHz at most, and I think it should run cool enough even if something does decide to peg the CPU.