Has it? CPUs ran much cooler back then. And gpus didn’t need brackets and special power cables and all that. Water cooling was harder. But also way less common or necessary.
CPUs now throttle to keep their temp in check. Back then, if the temp got too high they’d be permanently damaged like in the example above.
> Water cooling was harder. But also way less common or necessary.
Water cooling isn’t necessary today, either. The heat pipe heatsinks we have available are so good that you can cool every consumer CPU with a good air cooler. The automatic throttling means it won’t be a disaster if the temp gets high. Water cooling might get a few 100 more MHz during sustained all core workloads but it’s not necessary.
My Athlon 1100 was barely a third tdp at 60watts, yet was perilous to install, broke one (almost $1k, in 2001 money!), and then on the replacement had a 6500rpm screamer jet engine under my desk sitting on mobo that barely supported it and which could fail and kill my 1core cpu at any point :0
25 years ago I never had to wonder if my GPU or CPU cooler will fit the case, clear the RAM, or the HDD cage, if I have something to prop the GPU against so it doesn't sag, if the PSU power cables are fine or I need some adapter and if the adapter can cause a fire if not installed perfectly, if I can access the SSD slot after installing the GPU. That's before having the components in hand.
Installation brings new challenges, LGA sockets are fragile and generally unrepairable, the need for massive coolers leaves little room for maneuver in there, I need to replace the backplate and the general installation procedure is a lot more involved, many of the good thermal pastes are a pain to apply, and so on. The BIOS/UEFI is a jungle now but one you have to navigate to avoid issues introduced by manufacturers pushing setting to the limit in the default profile.
Well, it kinda depended on the CPU. And then sometimes the motherboard.
On the Intel side, P3s had a pin on Socket 370 to signal an immediate halt/shutdown. You could probably still damage the CPU, and I'm willing to bet a lot of the cheaper motherboards wouldn't respect it. But plenty did, since S370 needed other changes to support Coppermine anyway.
On the AMD Side, Athlon XPs and Morgan Durons did add a safety mechanism similar to the Pentium 3, but since the Thunderbird and Spitfire Durons did not, it was far far less supported.
Mobos and cases also seem better designed these days. Yes some components need more stuff than before but it all seems to plug in and slot and wrap and screw in nicely if you're patient and methodical. Heck even the cases themselves are somewhat less likely to slot your wrists :).
I feel ~2003 or so was the cusp when I started seeing less builds that were just maddeningly messy and sharp and hyper loud and crazy, and started getting more predictable and sane and workable.
All anecdotal and based on personal perception of course :)
These days I slap the CPU to the motherboard and a giant heatsink with two huge fans and call it a day.
Fair. I have a scar on the knuckle of my index finger from breaking off the cover on a 5 1/4” drive bay. I was trying to push it out and it suddenly gave. My finger slammed into sharp tin and cut deep.
I’m glad they don’t make them like that anymore.
That's because modern CPUs are thermally limited, so they are essentially designed to stay at their maximum temperature and regulate speed and voltage very quickly in order to achieve that.
I've not had as much experience with AMD CPUs, but have seen several times where the stock Intel cooler's mounting mechanism either wasn't fully latched from the beginning or worked itself loose over time, such that the heatsink was never in contact with the CPU, and the computer continued to operate normally, albeit much slower than it should --- sometimes for years --- with the CPU sitting at its maximum temperature and throttling all the time.
GPUs could be spooky hot. While the cards themselves didn't seem to care at all, the heat emanating from a 3dfx Voodoo3 card (I've had a 2000 and a 3500TV) could be enough to make other nearby cards stinky. Fan brackets and other hacks, from now long-defunct small companies like 3dfxcool, were pretty common.
We had PCI, then AGP, then PCI Express -- with overlaps. Woe be to those who errantly picked the older standard for their shiny new build; they would forever be stuck with their new hardware on the older bus, or with an even-deeper hole in their wallet.
There were other unfriendly things. RAM compatibility was weird; I remember a time around the turn of the century when double-sided RAM became inexpensive enough that was cheaper to buy 256MB of double-sided RAM that the PC may only use half of, than to buy 128MB of single-sided RAM.
Cables weren't always keyed, and when they were keyed it wasn't always in useful ways. Plugging a floppy drive in backwards was a common experience. A 40-pin IDE cable might have a key pin blocked off, while the hard drive had all 40 pins populated, and the two wouldn't fit together without modification.
Burning CDs was often a slow-moving disaster, involving feeding expensive blanks into an expensive drive installed in the machine every half-hour just to hope that things would work this time so you could finally listen to some of those MP3s in your Ford after you spent hours downloading them.
Unless you were foolish enough to buy an external drive, instead: As USB was attrociously-slow, those burners usually plugged into the printer port in what could be most-charitably described as an awful fucking mess.
And even if we weren't burning CDs, we had that pesky analog cable to deal with -- neither end of which was necessarily standardized -- so we could play Total Annihilation and listen to its (rather excellent) soundtrack at the same time.
We still had things like sound cards and modems and IRQs to deal with. NICs were often separate from motherboards. BIOS flashing felt like a dark and dangerous art. The fan headers often had different shapes, and usually only some of them were capable of ramping fan speeds.
At one point around that time, we rather quietly shifted the main power draw for new motherboards from the 5v rail to the 12v rail. Existing power supplies weren't always ready for this and it led some down expensive and unexpected paths.
I enjoyed working with PC hardware back then. But it was all pretty unfriendly, and I haven't even mentioned yet how much fun SCSI was to deal with.
Nowadays: We buy a fish tank and install a motherboard and power supply into it. The smart builder has already got the NVMe drive, CPU, and cooler fastened down into place in their purposeful mounts before this point. The fan headers all work. If we saved enough pennies, we add a GPU -- and it slots into the same x16 PCI Express socket that we've been using for over 20 years now. The NICs (often a plurality of them!) are built-in. There are no dip switches or configuration jumpers.
All that's left is to plug it in and install an OS. Easy.
I still remember, this causes the drive light to stay on all the time, but it didn't cause damage.
It died instantly.