How to Build a PC

[Headless Chicken]

Originally posted by kokopuffs
And don't forget that if smoke arises from the processor, well, you've blown it as I've seen from a couple of friends.

Actually, not the case anymore. Since the P3 days, Intel has put in safties to avoid such disasters. On TomsHardware, they took the heatsink/fan off various processors while the computer was running a processor intense application. The P3 would just completly shut off and the P4s would underclock itself to the point of no heat production. AMD, on the other hand, fried when this happend but this was with their older Thunderbird processors.

If you see smoke, most likely, its the power supply unit (PSU).

[kokopuffs]

...unless the wrong connection was made.