Programmer Humor

You get no shade from me. My only beef is with programmers who act like they are experts in all things computer when they aren't.

BTW, the issue in the picture is that the CPU cooler is attached to the wall of the case instead of the CPU. It shuts down because modern hardware will usually turn itself off when it overheats to mitigate the risk of permanent damage.

Wisdom is knowing what you don't know.

The big silver heat sink that's on the left is meant to be on the CPU, which is the Silver squarish shape towards the right. Keeping the CPU cool is a big deal — CPUs come with a smaller fan which is sufficient for many people, but people who use their PC more intensively, or want to extend the life of their CPU typically buy an additional cooler. Here's an example of a stock cooler, and here's a motherboard that's using the fairly basic aftermarket CPU cooler that I have. It was only $30, but when I was new to PC building, it was strongly recommended, because if your CPU gets too hot, it'll throttle itself and slow down. People who over clock their CPU (running it at a higher voltage for better performance) have to get even beefier cooling, such as water cooling. You can completely fry your CPU if you do something wrong when overclocking, and even if it doesn't get that bad, minor mistakes can cause crashes due to CPU overheating.

So TL;DR: keeping your CPU cool is super important for both performance and longevity of the CPU.

The PC in the top photo has zero cooling for the CPU. Not even the stock fan that comes with the CPU. That heatsink that's attached to the case fan is almost certainly intended for the CPU — you don't even need a heatsink in that location.

This means that this person's CPU will rapidly overheat soon after it is turned on.

Edit: you can actually see where the heat sink should match up to the CPU here

Then you're a typical programmer, at least in my experience.

The kind of state that would have me refund his money and tell him I'm baffled and can't figure it out.

what kind of state of mind you have to be in for that

Probably crazy enough to demand that the PC repair shop has to bear all the costs he caused by his genius idea.

I asked chatgpt to put my CPU into heat consuming mode and it then suggested I mine BTC to equal out the thermodynamics. I'm still trying to figure out where the BTC is, but it's nice to go green

Good catch! I haven’t messed with one of those systems since the P4 era, i had two that were the only systems I scrapped before they died, they were just that mix of indestructible, dog slow, and with absolutely no upgrade path whatsoever

That "we" isn't global. Some called it "the CPU", some called it "the hard drive", some made fun of those two groups for not knowing what they were talking about.

Looks like an ASUS A320M-C based on the very hard to read text and the layout.

https://motherboarddb.com/motherboards/378/

So an early AMD AM4 motherboard.

You'd be mistaken, Intel hasn't had a clip mounting system since socket 478 P3 days. Even P4 on 478 had 4 corner mounting systems and all of the Intel systems had them since.

The cheapo aluminum coolers from Intel always had that rotated design to get a little bit more surface area in the same volume. With the age of this system Intel had copper pucks in the middle of their heatsinks. It wasn't till later they went full aluminum. This is very clearly an AM4 motherboard as seen by the mounting.

Like the other commenter pointed out, it's an A320M-C board, it says right on it.