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How to fry an egg using an Athlon XP1500+

PC turned into domestic appliance in mad experiment

Someone with obviously too much time on their hands, and a gourmet bent, has worked out how you can fry an egg using an Athlon XP1500+ CPU.

Trubador details how he turned his PC into a domestic appliance capable of cooking an egg in 11 minutes in a quite remarkable posting on Tekforums, which comes complete with pictures. The man himself has been in touch with us to assure us the experiment wasn't faked.

To start with Trubador opened up his PC, took out the fans and created a heatsink using copper coins, which he clipped onto his CPU using ThermoResin.

"I normally use Arctic Silver but this was just way too thin for the ridges on the coin matching the top of the CPU core," Trubador helpfully explains.

He then turned on his machine and waited for three to four minutes for everything to heat up nicely before putting a silver foil tray on the heatsink, into which he cracked his egg.

"The heat transfer was not up to the quantities of a normal frying pan, and it was a tedious task waiting for the Egg to cook, but 11 minutes later it was loverly," he reports.

After the addition of a dollop of brown sauce, Trubador was able to enjoy a rather splendid egg sarnie.

Top marks that man!

Trubador used a disposable chip to carry out his task, which he was able to put back to normal use after the fry up. If you try his recipe you might not be so lucky - be warned.

If you're foolhardy enough to try repeating this madness (perhaps taking it even further by cooking a spot of bacon), here's the kit Trubador used...


  1. Athlon XP1500+ CPU
  2. MSI K7T266 Pro-2 Raid motherboard
  3. 720gig hard drives (this is a file server rig)
  4. Juno P6 case
  5. 24x Liteon CD RW
  6. 16x LG DVD
  7. Soundblaster Platinum + Livedrive
  8. Floppy

And the vital ingredients for a perfect egg sandwitch...


  1. 1 x Egg
  2. 1 x Roll of Silver Foil
  3. 1 x Brown Sauce
  4. 2 x Slices Bread
  5. 1 x Heatsink

Ainsley Harriott, eat your heart out... ®

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