Vaccumed CPU heatsink - runs 30 deg cooler!

Wow. I happened to notice that my CPU was running a little warm and the machine was generally bogging down and crashing randomly. So I opened it up and vacuumed the case out, thinking that was enough.

But when I shined my Q3 into the CPU fan assembly, expecting to see the aluminum heatsink underneath it, all I could see was a thick layer of dust. So I pulled the fan off of the heatsink and found that it was completely clogged with a thick layer of dust! Yuck.


After cleaning out the heatsink and reassembling, the CPU is now running 25-30 degrees cooler and the machine is stable and quick again. Right now it's sitting happily at 98 degrees F, the first time that I've seen double-digit temps in awhile.

Moral of the story - inspect the heatsink periodically, even if the rest of the case seems reasonably clean. The area where this CPU is sitting is pretty clean so I had NO idea that it was sucking in so much schmutz.

**edit** I just realized that however I try to spell vacuumed, it looks wrong!

hmmmn looks like a job for me tomorow.im like 40 c but im sure the hsf is dirty

wow, unless you got a really old PC that's pretty bad! My 486, and PII never got cleaned and when I opened them they weren't that bad off! It will be years and years again before I upgrade this machine, it's got more vent's and grills than my other ones, so we'll see how bad the dust gets in!!

On the same heat issue note, I need to get rid of the early gen Intel HS/Fan. It's hot, and noisey!!!! Darn fan is going out I think... I can't put a large HS on here b/c of the MB capacitors and NB HS though.. hmmm. I need something with copper in it...

raggie33 said:

hmmmn looks like a job for me tomorow.im like 40 c but im sure the hsf is dirty

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Make sure you check out the heat sink fins underneath the fan also. That's where my problem was.

IsaacHayes, this is a 1ghz Athlon with an ECS K7S5A mobo. It's not that old. I'm now starting to think about adding an additional case fan as well as improving the filtering. I should probably also open up the power supply and clean it out also. I took the vacuum cleaner to the PS's fan ports but that's probably not enough.

pw i had thast mobo at one time may still even have it.some of em had probelms with the chipset overheating if i recLL

Even though it's messy, I suggest that you use a can of compressed air instead of a vacuum. The hose of a vacuum often acts like a Van De Graf Static Electricity Generator. The static electricity can seriously zap your CPU and or other components.

At the phone company we saw training films that demonstrated the static buildup from many different sources. Vacuum cleaners were one of examples.

A clean heat sink does make a world of difference. Put a pencil or sonmething in the fan blades when you blow it out to keep it from spinning like crazy. They can become itty bitty generators and feed back into the mobo. I've lost one fan that way, and one mobo became unstable.

i remove hsf complety then remove fan from heatsink then wash it in sink drying it thoroly and reaply thermal paste

Change over to water-cooling, and you'll have a quieter machine and won't have to worry about vacuuming heat sinks!! (Now, you might have to vacuum a radiator...)

Everyone should clean and dust their pc once a quarter, at LEAST twice a year...

That is if you want it to live long, and prosper.

a one gig athlon is long in the tooth by computer standards though..

PF, for a moment I thought you were running a vacuum cleaner as an exhaust to suck the hot air away from the CPU whilst the PC was in use!

J_Oei said:

Change over to water-cooling, and you'll have a quieter machine and won't have to worry about vacuuming heat sinks!! (Now, you might have to vacuum a radiator...)

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... or mop up leaks if you're unlucky! But I love my watercooled PC as it's so much quieter & well, cool to look at.

I used to do point of sale software for a major retail chain, and part of that was also doing support. Though hardware wasn't strictly my responsibility there was a certain tendency on the part of the hardware department to blame things on software that couldn't possibly be I was witness to opening older PC's in some stores that were behaving erratically and finding the insides COMPLETELY packed with dust bunnies. Not just coated, but filled. The heat causes all sorts of strange things to happen, it was a credit to the older PC hardware that it mostly kept running in this condition. But then those chips didn't generate nearly as much heat as a modern one did. In one case the dust in a machine was so packed that it caught fire! Smoldering cinders flying out the fan!

So yes, it does build up in there depending on how much dust you have in the air to start with and if you have pets, then forget it Open them up periodically and clean them out.

I have two computers I built, both of them quiet but one packs the dust into the heatsink constantly. My Athlon64 uses a Thermalright XP90 monster sink with heatpipes with my son's (overclocked) Athlon XP-M mobile processor using a pure copper Thermalright with a Vantec Stealth 80mm fan. The chronic dust problem is the XP-M (laptop processor overclocked to 2.1GHz on a 210MHz/420MHz bus) The slim fins on the heatsink clog easily so it needs to be cleaned once every month or two.
The A64 with XP90 has a 92mm fan sucking air off the heatsink with speed varied depending on load (generally 1000-1800 RPM) it has been running for 4 months and there is no change in temps or dust build up. It has to do with the fin spacing and sucking air through the fins of the heatsink. The air is pretty much a straight shot VS the older Thermalright copper were the air slams into the bottom of the heatsink, dumping the dirt and changing direction to exhaust.
Thermalright just came out with a sink called the SI-97 which looks interesting. The base is only attached to heatpipes and stands very tall to a huge heatsink were the heatpipe tubes end. A 120mm fan spins slowly sucking air through the "radiator" looking thing, if you want it can blow through also. It fits Athlon64 and P4 processors and clears every known board out there. If you run a AthlonXP, the SI-94 is setup the same way and uses a 92mm fan.
An amazing heatsink will lower the flow requirements through the fins, this will keep the heatsink clean and let you run cooler. Thermalrights COST?! Yeah, well... you can't have it all unless you pony up the bucks. They run in the range of $40 to $60 with a fan. Yep, 120mm fans are not cheap and the quiet ones are Nexus, Globe and Panaflo L series.

Well, this is one thing I like about my PC. The CPU fan has a huge green duct attached to it, blowing air straight out the back of the case. Keeps temps in there down. Also means that keeping the insides clean is a pretty simple matter of fitting an air filter to the inlet vent fan, has worked so far! No dust on the CPU heatsink or inside at all, despite the system having been in use since the middle of 2003.

I've got motherboard Monitor running here, alarm goes off when the temp goes up by 5 degrees from normal - that's when it's time to clean the filter.

flashlight said:

PF, for a moment I thought you were running a vacuum cleaner as an exhaust to suck the hot air away from the CPU whilst the PC was in use!

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Naw, but I do use it to mop up memory leaks!

BentHeadTX,

I'm using a water-cooled XP-M 2500+ OC'ed to 2465MHz on 205Mhz/410Mhz bus - love them XP-Ms. I switched to water-cooling as I found HSFs too big, heavy, hard to install (some require removal of the motherboard as the mounting screws need to go through the back of the motherboard) & need fast & noisy fans (think Delta FF screamers :duck: ) though the larger 92mm & 120mm fans you mentioned do help reduce noise quite a bit. I use a AC Ryan Blackfire UV LED 120mm fan & it's nice, quite & cool too. I do still get some dust in the casing & the radiator fins need to vacuumed every now & then too but at least I don't have to worry about static too much there.


Zelandeth,

Fan ducts & filters are cool solutions too (though you do lose some flow with the filters).


PhotonFanatic,

I get a lot of that too.

flashlight: you just had a memory leak right now! (you said photonfanatic, when you're talking to photonwrangler!) :doh: !

IsaacHayes said:

flashlight: you just had a memory leak right now! (you said photonfanatic, when you're talking to photonwrangler!) :doh: !

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:sick2: :green: :duh2:

Benthead, I'm going to look into those ThermalRight heatsinks. Thanks.

I also picked up a mesh filter this evening to place on the intake fan. That should help.

IsaacHayes said:

flashlight: you just had a memory leak right now! (you said photonfanatic, when you're talking to photonwrangler!) :doh: !

Click to expand...

Lessee, we have photonwrangler (me), photonfanatic, photonflinger, hooked on photons, photonboy... I think I see a pattern here...