Dust and heat inside your computer

As most of you know SL, with all it's GPU and CPU intensiveness, heats up almost every hardware component in your box........especially your graphics card. This morning I noticed my GPU was running a little hotter than it usually does (18 degrees C). I took a screen shot before I shut down to clean the inside of my computer so I could compare with an "after" screen shot. I really did it just for myself to make it easy to see all the temps plus the CPU usage but after I saw the difference in the GPU temps I thought it might be interesting for others to see.

The "After":
http://i323.photobucket.com/albums/nn474/PeggyPaperdoll/Aftercomputercasecleaned.jpg

The "Before":
http://i323.photobucket.com/albums/nn474/PeggyPaperdoll/Beforecomputercasecleaned.jpg

You can see the 18.5% improvement (that's an 18 degrees celius drop in temp) from simply taking the side off my case and blowing all the dust out......which there was really very little since I do that about every 3 or 4 weeks). Granted, I live in Southern California which is probably one of the dustiest places on earth durring the dry season (which is about 90% of the year.....LOL), so dust is more a problem here than most places. Plus I have indoor animals that don't help either (but I love 'em and I'll put up with it. ). You can clearly see how dust does cause unnecessary heat build up. It does not take much to remedy either.

Maybe it's time for your case cleaning..........it never hurts anyway.

Hope you guys take a look at the pictures I linked..........it's important for your computer's good health.

Oh yes, I learned it the hard way and fried my card first.

also if you smoke (like alot) around your computer, you might as well not bother cleaning it until you have new fans, a putty knife, a tooth brush and a strong stomach

the tar biuldup is nasT, on your bigger case fans it might be able to be wiped off with some windex, (amoina based glass cleaner kills smoke tar / soot )

but your power supply is pretty much screwed, (unless your smart / brave enough to take it apart)

and anything thats attached to a heat sink needs to be removed

blowing it out will not remove the 1/8th inch of black tar /dust /yuck gummi cake sitting in between the bottom of the fan and the top of the heat sink

rememer kiddies, funk traps heat, heat kills speed, and too much heat kills electronics, its as simple as that

Just wanted to emphasize this... and it doesn't require smoke in the environment for this to accumulate. Recently I noticed my fan running pretty much constantly; a week later, it started to switch off when there was too much CPU activity. Taking it apart, I found the case to be pretty clean inside--except hidden under the CPU fan atop the heatsink, which was essentially plugged solid with a very fine dust! A few minutes spent removing the fan and wielding a camel hair brush resulted in a near-silent machine. I'd forgotten it could ever be so quiet!