Do all CPU's eventually fail?

[DoNoHarm]

Hello everyone,

I recently joined the Rosetta @ Home project (http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/) where you can donate your CPU time to discover new drugs and aid scientific breakthroughs. Will running this program almost every night on my computer significantly increase the risk of hardware failure? The CPU load basically shoots upto 100%. Now obviously the less you use your computer the less it will break down, but are computer hardware components more like lightbulbs that will each fail after a set number of hours or are they more like TV sets that may *eventually* fail, but for all intense and purposes continue to operate for long enough for you not to care?

PS, if anyone is interested in other National Science Foundation projects like SETI, you can donate your computer time for those as well at: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

 

[Eidorian]

I'd concern myself with dust and the MBF of the fans before the CPU decides to buy it.

 

[rychencop]

the more things are used, the quicker they wear out. mechanical or electrical.

 

[J the Ninja]

the more things are used, the quicker they wear out. mechanical or electrical.

That being said, its pretty hard to keep a CPU from outliving both it's usefulness and its cooling fan. These things last 10 years+.

 

[TXBDan]

There are 20 year old CPUs still cranking away at NASA.

I do folding@home on my MBP on occasion. My PS3 folds 24/7.

 

[yellow]

As others have noted, anything will fail given the right amount of time, but there's a lot more parts that will likely fail before a CPU. Mechanical things.

 

[Cabbit]

I still have working intel 286dx chips working and upwards. Only CPU i have had fail was a AMD duron 800MHz i decided to hard clock to 2GHz before it smoked. The old 286 and similar chips have not failed but the PSU and other components seem to have a usable life limit.

 

[kdum8]

Hello everyone,

I recently joined the Rosetta @ Home project (http://boinc.bakerlab.org/rosetta/) where you can donate your CPU time to discover new drugs and aid scientific breakthroughs. Will running this program almost every night on my computer significantly increase the risk of hardware failure? The CPU load basically shoots upto 100%. Now obviously the less you use your computer the less it will break down, but are computer hardware components more like lightbulbs that will each fail after a set number of hours or are they more like TV sets that may *eventually* fail, but for all intense and purposes continue to operate for long enough for you not to care?

PS, if anyone is interested in other National Science Foundation projects like SETI, you can donate your computer time for those as well at: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/

I think you would need to worry about your Hard Disk Drive more than your cpu. Cpu's can run 24/7 for years, but every hard drive will fail after a few years and the more you subject it to the quicker that will happen. The new Solid State drives are better though, once they become more established it will improve things for all.

I used to run SETI@home a lot but don't want to keep replacing my HDD so I stopped.

 

[Firefly2002]

I think you would need to worry about your Hard Disk Drive more than your cpu. Cpu's can run 24/7 for years, but every hard drive will fail after a few years and the more you subject it to the quicker that will happen. The new Solid State drives are better though, once they become more established it will improve things for all.

Hard drives can last decades sometimes, actually. I have one over 10 years old working. One almost 20, actually. So not just a few years.

And yeah... anything with no moving parts... so CPUs, RAM, chipsets etc.

I used to run SETI@home a lot but don't want to keep replacing my HDD so I stopped.

SETI doesn't really work with large files or rely on a lot of disk access so that's not likely what made your drives fail.

 

[duffyanneal]

SETI doesn't really work with large files or rely on a lot of disk access so that's not likely what made your drives fail.

No, but having the machine running 24/7 with the hard drive spinning will do the trick. Obviously, the HDD needs to be set to spin down if possible. Normal notebook HDDs don't have the same TBF as a desktop or server grade drive.

 

[DoNoHarm]

Thanks

Thanks people, especially since I have applecare, I think I'll let my baby chug away to help humanity!