So last night I was running a program that utilized 100% of my CPU for a while and my desktop crashed. It turned itself off, and the power light (next to the power button) was blinking slowly. Pressing the power button did nothing. The light remained blinking until I cut the power, and when I returned power nothing at all happened - the blinking didn't return and the power button still did nothing. So to pinpoint the problem, I first checked the power supply. The power supply fan starts up when the green wire is shorted to ground. When I plug in only the 24-pin MOBO connector and press the power button, the fans start up and the power light comes on. However, when I plug in the 8-pin CPU power as well, the power button does nothing. Does this mean that I have a fried CPU? I wouldn't be surprised if it overheated from running full speed (It's an 8 core, 4 GHz processor so it can generate a lot of heat), but I'd expect failsafes to shut it down before anything melted in there.

Shutting down the system when the CPU overheats before damage is done is not usually a default setting of many systems, though most can be configured to do that. My Linux 8-core system is so configured. It will map out overheating memory, and gracefully shut down the system if the CPU is overheating, but I had to configure it to do that. I'm not 100% sure about Windows systems. I think your system is fried. If you are lucky, the disc drive and data is still intact.

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