PhotonWrangler
Flashaholic
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!
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!
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