A teensy bit of dust can make a suprising difference (IMO) and gfx cooling advice pls

[mikeymikec]

I started this thread several months ago:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?t=2275307&highlight=

I took advice from it and put a thin layer of sponge across the grill areas on my case's side panel which has made quite a bit of difference. I've checked it once or twice since last August and the dust buildup has dropped dramatically in the CPU HSF.

After my contribution and a response or two on this thread:
http://forums.anandtech.com/showthread.php?p=35113391&highlight=#post35113391

I thought I'd check it again (that and 100C GPU when playing Crysis* is probably worth checking for anything silly). As usual, the graphics card hardly had any dust in the HSF at all (ie. no fins were being blocked). The CPU HSF was a similar story, thanks to the sponge covering the side panel grills.

The surprising thing is the 5C drop for both CPU and GPU. My 5770 now idles at 44C, approximately the same fan speed as before. The CPU fan speed may have altered by one or two hundred RPM as well, nothing audibly noticeable IMO.

My question is, a suggestion was made on the second thread I URL'd about re-applying thermal paste on the GPU. I'm nervous about this idea because I haven't done it before and I'm not sure that it's necessary/desirable to. I haven't yet run Crysis again since the cleanout to see how much of a difference the clean will make to load temps.

The graphics card is this one:
http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=3283

* - I am using MSI AfterBurner and I have defined a fan management scheme of my own, but I doubt that its logic can be called into question since I've told it to hit 100% fan speed at 75C.

 

[dma0991]

Unless its clogged with dust or TIM dried out, disassembling it will have no noticeable gain. A while back I was disassembling two Sapphire HD6870 belonging to a friend of mine, the reason being it overheated and crashed Shogun: Total War 2.

His was indeed dusty but as I took out the heatsink, TIM was still wet. Cleaned the fins, reapplied fresh TIM and reassembled. Temps were about the same before the routine but didn't crash afterwards(or I was never told whether it did afterwards).

Disassembling it shouldn't be too difficult. It could be as easy as removing the 4 screws(minimum) affixed around the GPU core.

 

[Ratman6161]

....
My question is, a suggestion was made on the second thread I URL'd about re-applying thermal paste on the GPU. I'm nervous about this idea because I haven't done it before and I'm not sure that it's necessary/desirable to. I haven't yet run Crysis again since the cleanout to see how much of a difference the clean will make to load temps.
...

Taking it apart is probably overkill. FYI you can probably do just as much good by pulling the card and vacuuming it out with a shop vac.

Different scenario but the same idea is that I had several users at work complaining that their laptops were running very slowly and were also very noisy. When I looked at them the fans were running full blast all the time. Put my hand on the bottom and it was very noticeably hot. Long story short these were three year old laptops. air intake is on the bottom and they were sucking in dust. The dust got bad causing heat and the fans compensated by running at full blast. But that wasn't enough. Hardware monitor showed them running hot enough to reach thermal throttling.

Took some covers off the bottom and blew everything out with canned air. Cleaned them up, put them back together, and all was well.

So yes, dust can be a big problem. But just blowing out the dust may well be good enough and save you a lot of dis-assembly.

 

[mikeymikec]

Playing Crysis resulted in ~95C load GPU temps rather than 100/101C.