Washed my heatsink - saved 16 C

[Mark R]

My old Athlon 1000 MHz had been running at about 65 C recently. While that is a perfectly acceptable temperature, what concerned me was that when I assembled the system about 18 months ago, the temperatures were barely 50 C.

Anyway, the coolermaster cooler uses a very narrow fin design - rather like the radiator in a car engine. It had totally clogged with dust such that there was no air-flow to be felt exiting the heatsink.

Anyway, I removed it - hosed it out. Cleaned the fan and polished to copper base plate.

CPU temperature today was 60C at idle, dropping to 44C at idle following cleaning.

The lesson from this is that narrow fin heatsinks may be small and powerful, but they are highly susceptible to clogging.

 

[BG4533]

I don't think a lot of people still realize the problems dust can cause in their system. It is important to either clean your system out with compressed air or some other way every few weeks or months at the most and also to use intake filters to reduce the amount of dust getting into your system.

Brian

 

[Jeriko]

Yeah I dropped 10+ degrees celcius when I cleaned the heatsink on my Athlon 1.33. Part of the reason I'm putting filters on my new system.

-J

 

[lenjack]

Be sure to make the intake filters easily accessable. If they are hard to clean or change, it wont get done.

 

[colonel]

true, I use to have the SK7 from thermalright with thin cooper and was always dust inside, now I try to get heatsink like the AX7.

 

[deerslayer]

Heatsink cleaning is a must!