Why Pentium 509

You mean that video by Tom's Hardware? If that was the same cause as your system failure, then I would have to say the cost and cause of your loss should be shouldered by the person who yanked off your heatsink while you were using it and by you for not stopping the lunatic.

I've done this experiment with my friend. We ran Prime95 on the AthlonXP with the heatsink WITHOUT a spinning fan, deliberately at that time to check if the chip would really burn in a more realistic case of fan failure. The system eventually hang after a few minutes with temperatures reaching the 90s but nothing burnt. If we had bothered to set the onboard temperature monitor-shutdown, it would likely have shutdown way before the system froze. Suffice to say the chip worked fine after that test and did so until the system was upgraded.

So I'm inclined to believe that if you had to replace $1000 worth of parts per system, something else is wrong. In fact, the only thing I can think of and have known of that's capable of taking out almost every component in the system during failure, is the PSU.

-- A Lost Angel, fallen from heaven Lost in dreams, Lost in aspirations, Lost to the world, Lost to myself