M/B: Tyan 2466N-4M bios V4.05 (can't be bothered upgrading to 4.06 as the change is something pretty insignificant).

It ran perfectly for several years with 2 MP2000+ CPUs then about a year ago I killed one of the CPUs with a misaligned heatsink after doing some cleaning . It's been running perfectly on one CPU since then.
A few weeks ago I finally got around to getting a couple of MP2400+ CPUs (mismatched, but from everything I could find that apparently doesn't seem to make a huge difference). Also got two new AMD recommended heatsinks. It worked perfectly for several weeks and then the other day I went out in the evening and when I got home it was completely non-responsive. After much messing around with ram, video cards and hard drive I eventually started looking at the CPUs. One works fine (on its own in either socket), the other simply doesn't work on its own (doesn't even POST) but is recognised in socket 0 (but not in socket 1 ?!?) if the other is present, but not as an MP processor. It's currently back to a single processor machine with the good 2400.

Is it possible for a processor to suddenly die if using mismatched ones?

Don't know about that, but I do know that you need to pay very close attention to the older mainboards. Plenty of those dual processor boards needed a recap with decent capacitors.

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The opinions expressed above do not represent those of Advanced Micro Devices or any of their affiliates.

Physics? Ha! This is clearly magic and devilry at work. Prepare firewood! We have witches to burn!


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