[jeffbee]

Just to clarify for the audience, there is nothing you can do within reason that will cause your CPU to ever self-heat above 100°. They manage their own power to stay below their maximum design junction temperature, less a safety margin. Even if you ran it without a heat sink, it will not run above 100°. It just won't run very well or very often.

[formerly_proven]

I damaged some traces on an AMD board which allowed the CPU to talk to the VRM (anything related to SVI2 couldn’t be read when booted) and even that didn’t kill anything, it just put the system in like a 0.8 V, 400 MHz mode. Windows 10 takes an incredible amount of time to do literally anything on a system like that btw., even with twelve cores. Patched the traces and everything was back to normal.

Modern hardware is really difficult to permanently damage as long as you don’t go full “manual OC” - in that case many protections may be disabled, and you can certainly get Ryzens to overheat and die like that.

[eptcyka]

Intel CPUs most certainly will hit 100°C and above in laptops.