Southern Comfort said: Toms Hardware did a test back in the day between Pentium 3's, Pentium 4's and Athlon XPs, they pulled the heat sink off while the PC was running just to see what would happen. The P3 locked hard, but was fine after reinstalling the heat sink and rebooting. The P4 soft locked, but resumed as soon as the heat sink was reinstalled. The Athlon XP lit on fire.
Southern Comfort said: Cracked many an Athlon core myself. But then, I also overclocked a Duron 600 to 1100 mHz, and ran it that way for years, so there's that.