Dust Your PC - Part 3

As I said, I have never dusted a computer before, but I came up with what ended up being a reasonable plan. I bought compressed air & a small brush from staples for $7 total & used a rag I have here. I made positive to unplug my computer, grounded myself to discharge static electricity by touching something metal other than my computer, opened up the case & was prepared to go.

As long as you make positive your computer is unplugged, don't get anything wet, & are gentle while you have it opened, you ought to not damage anything. For the most part, the inside of your computer is delicate, but it is not brittle. The most notable exception is your CPU. In the event you were to disconnect it & pull it out of the motherboard you would expose pins on the bottom that are in fact delicate.

You could do an thorough job by taking everything apart & getting all the dust out, but I didn't require to spend that much time doing it & I figured if I left everything connected their was less chance I'd mess something up. So I used the air, brush & rag & got the dust off the computer, taking the most time to tidy the fans & the holes they blow out of.

I ran the same tests again, & the results were dramatic.

Idle, CPU saw an 18% reduction in temperature, while CPU is 10% cooler. That is important, as all those hours my computer is sitting doing small it is going to be considerably cooler.

At full load, CPU is 21% cooler & CPU is 12% cooler. These are again impressive results, & important as well. I have had lock ups when video encoding & doing other CPU intensive tasks, & now the chips ought to be walking cooler while doing those.

It is fascinating that originally CPU was hotter than CPU, & after the cleaning they switched. An important fact is that the temperature reporting on this type of dual AMD Athlon system is usually uneven. That said, CPU was simpler to dust around because the DVD drives were in the way of CPU, so I probably did a better job cleaning the former & there is still likely room for improvement in cooling the latter.

other note, I kept track of the fan speeds before & after cleaning, & I saw about a 2% increase in the CPU fan speeds after I dusted. I wasn't expecting this at all, & definitely cannot be positive that this will always result from dusting, but it could be fascinating for overclockers trying to eak out every last small tiny small tiny little bit of fan performance.

The hard drive temperature saw a 9% improvement while idle after dusting, & again a 9% improvement at full load. It is a pleasant temperature reduction for a mechanical part that will be grinding away for thousands of hours over the life of your computer.

The case temperature stayed the same throughout all the tests.