I've got some (not too great) experiences with VIA boards. These boards are so slow that there's no point to this whole drama at all. By now, there are probably some cell phones and other gadgets running faster processors without a cooler anyway.

You can run any processor without a cooler if you slow it down enough.

It would be more impressive if the specs of these boards would at least keep up with a decent desktop or media PC – which they don't. This is just a dumb marketing plot – "look ma, no cooler".

What format is the MPEG4 in? It looks like it's a 320x240 thing, so not exactly stressful. I also imagine that it is offloaded to the chipset. Can a 500MHz C7 even do full SD MPEG4 decode, never mind HD?

Of course, this does prove that VIA have a good product in the low-end platform space (rather than just a really good low power CPU).

The last CPU that I owned that didn't need a heatsink was a 486 (25MHz). Now my CPU, GPU, NB, SB, and VRMs all have heatsinks and/or fans on them... is that progress?

;o) Okay okay, who's willing to try this with a Prescott Pentium 4?

IIRC, after a couple minutes of that, the P4 also locked up. Throttling is meant to correct for temporary overheats only -- with no heatsink at all, the temperature quickly exceeds the second trip threshold and a lockup occurs.

In that THG video the P4 kept going. And actually sped back up to full speed as soon as the heatsink touched the spreader.

The P3 is the one that eventually locked up.

Great! I've won… VIA parts... oh joy...

If that power thingy would be moved out of the casing, we wouldn't need as much cooling.

They should just load up Windows Vista DremeScene.

Question: does their CPU have a frequency step down/ power use reduction feature whenever it gets too hot? doesn't Intel have a feature where if the processor gets too hot it skips cycles.

I imagine VIA's point is that their CPU doesn't need a cooler...