No links, no apologies. Dude's microphone license needs to be revoked, RIGHT NOW.
However...
*just to be clear: they really, really don't
[sigh]
I've been regretting that "Green Hotness" nickname, lately, since I'm finally certain that overheating is what killed it. More specifically, there's one big chip permanently mounted on the mainboard that was never adequately cooled. I don't mean the CPU, no; I was able to sit a really nice aftermarket cooling fan on that, because that's how it was designed.
Imagine your city builds pair of train stations within a block of each other, to split the heavy daily traffic they anticipate into zones. Station N serves All Points North, while Station S sends folks South. It works and things are fine for a while. Years later, though, the city hits hard times, and they close Station S, routing all traffic through N instead. If Station N was originally designed with enough tracks, and was laid out cleverly enough, then maybe it could handle the extra load with minimal reworking of the timetables.
And this combined "Station N" chip on my mainboard? ...well, it couldn't. Here's why:
Problem is, all the additional electrical traffic made the combo chip run hot. Way too hot. That copper pipe, which is supposed to lead the heat away from the chip to be dissipated by the fins in the upper left, is completely inadequate to the task. It's like trying to air-condition your whole train station with your old dorm-room fan. And since there's so little room in there, once the video card is set up properly, there's no way to add additional heatsinks, a water-cooling block, or anything else, to improve cooling. And the video card is REQUIRED; there's no way to use the mainboard without one. Even if a plain-vanilla onboard chip would have been good enough for this computer, there isn't one available.
So it basically slow-cooked itself to death. And now I need to figure out how to get all the data off my two harddrives, which are perfectly operational, except that they require a different chip on my now-irreparable mainboard to function (I chose hardware-based RAID 0, or "striping").
If that combination Northbridge/Southbridge chip had only been positioned out of the way of the video card, I could've modded the system to cool it better. If only. aaaaaaaaaaargh
Screw it, I'm bumping Johnny Dangerously to the top of the queue. Michael Keaton vs. Joe Piscopo! What more do you want?