A Review of the Pentium M on the Desktop - Don't try this at home?
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So far, so good, but I wanted to see just how far down you could turn this thing. So I unplugged the fan on the heatsink, leaving it as a passive cooling device. At 1.7GHz, the Pentium M had no complaints about functioning in this manner. I used it for nearly a day doing all my normal tasks: video editing, email, DVD watching, and of course writing. I didn't try any explicit benchmarking, as I wasn't about to really try to abuse the poor chip. With a bigger piece of metal sitting over it, I'm sure it could survive quite pleasantly like that.
So, the next step was to try something I haven't done in years: run the processor without a heatsink. No, I don't have a wish to piss away the $300 I spent on the P-M 735. I considered it a scientific experiment. After first dropping the clock speed to 800MHz, and significantly reducing the voltage of the chip itself to 0.95V, I tried to boot and get into the BIOS. Success! While I'm too afraid of ruining my investment to leave it like that for longer than it took to boot and then turn back off again, the fact that it accomplished such a thing and didn't turn to charcoal is an indication of the low heat output of the processor.
Yes, that's what a CPU looks like without a heatspreader / idiot handling shield on top of it for those of you who have only been paying attention since the Athlon64 and Pentium4 introductions. One of the bonuses that come with a mobile processor is being able to cool the core directly, and see the silicon itself instead of some bland piece of metal.
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