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Penny Arcade - Comic - This Is Why I’m Hot
Dog
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Registered User, Administrator, Vanilla Staff admin
Penny Arcade - Comic - This Is Why I’m Hot
Videogaming-related online strip by Mike Krahulik and Jerry Holkins. Includes news and commentary.
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The joke is supposed to be that Gabe is a relative doofus about PCs, and is thus speaking in scientifically questionable terms gleaned from a commercial which referenced the normal mouth as being a dry, scorching desert (with appropriate visuals), but a winterfresh mouth being "much....much....cooler!" (cue scenes of swimming, snowboarding, etc).
In my experience, they'll usually shut down within a couple minutes just sitting in the BIOS menu.
The white-looking square in the top middle is the main processor for the computer. It gets extremely hot, and needs a heat sink and a fan to help it cool down otherwise it won't function.
Something like this, at the very least:
This has to be one of the best one of the best things Jerry has written in a while.
As noted above, the second panel is basically something you should never see unless you're building a computer, and then in the roughly 30 seconds between installing the CPU and putting the heat sink on it.
Think of it as the tech support equivalent of someone bringing their car in complaining about low acceleration and the mechanic finding it only had half an engine. The question is less why the car had low acceleration than wondering how such a situation ever came up in the first place and how they got it to drive to the mechanics in the first place. Under any normal use that computer would probably overheat in less than ten seconds, which is probably why it has smoke coming out in the first panel.
A normal Dragon's mouth
Or (to use an even more direct comparison) finding a car with no radiator.
TBF, when's the last time you've seen a Winterfresh commercial on the air?
I think the last time a Winterfresh commercial like the one being referenced was on the air was about the time someone who would remember it and get the reference was younger and much...much...cooler!
So like...a super long time ago :bigfrown:
It's usually orbit or 5 gum these days.
I would hope so, but life has taught me the harsh lesson that one can devise the most foolproof safety measures in all creation, and there will still be those that demonstrate a savant-like ur-genius at bypassing those measures at the worst possible time.
That's the opposite of overthinking.
Back in my day, our processors melted, and we LIKED it.
Wait, no, that's not right. We DIDN'T like it. But it did totally happen.
Yeah these days overtemp protections on most processors and motherboards will shut down before things get too bad. In that one video from several years ago where they took the heatsink off while running i think only one of them actually burned.
Though it's still not a good idea to repeatedly overheat it because frequent heating cooling cycles are bad.
The main problem with having a heatsink attached is that the processor will hit that limit suddenly, throttle back aggressively, cool down a bit, speed up, rinse and repeat, giving you really inconsistent performance and temperatures. But I've never had a pure CPU shut down due to temperature in years, I've only ever had that with CPUs that have integrated graphics when both parts are being worked hard, and even then, newer processors are better at balancing the two.
There's still a risk of damage doing something silly like this, but I think we're generally past the good old days where a processor would literally melt itself or catch fire.
Speaking of which, I discovered something surprising not too long ago. We'd had some reports of performance problems with some software we wrote. As part of trying to help out the main programmer, I was doing some testing. I intentionally made the program go into a tight loop. And yet, looking at the cpu graph none of the cores maxed out. For example, on a four core machine, it showed the app using 25% of each core. Now, those aren't all truly operating simultaneously, as it's still single-threaded. It is more like throwing the hot potato back and forth between cores.
I was quite puzzled, until I realized that at some point the chips/OS got smart enough to balance even a single-threaded app across all the cores. I've been a full-time programmer and builder-of-my-own-systems for about two decades, and I had somehow missed this transition. I told this to the other person with the same kind of experience, and they flat out didn't believe me until I showed them.
I've (intentionally due to a combination of not being a subject expert and it getting even more off-topic) glossed over how this is actually achieved. But upon googling it, I found a very good reason (that is related to this thread) for it beyond anything else: heat distribution. Maxing out one core while others are idle is going to create a hot spot.
to be honest, a lot of what you're seeing in that particular shot is RGB LED lighting, which, if we're being honest, has no actual functional value to the computer.
steam | Dokkan: 868846562
It probably changed about the time they stopped making case edges out of razor blades.