Computer Physical cleaning is not less important than scheduled Defrag or Registry cleaning & maintenance. The computer is pumping/streaming a lot of air through its innards. The more fans, the more amounts of air passes from the front of the computer
Figure 1 – CPU Cooler Fins Dust Clogged
throughout the GPU & CPU fans and it is channeled out by the exhaust fans. All this air is full of particles of dust that cling to the fans blades, clog the air filters (if you have them) & finally plug up the CPU & GPU cooler fins. The other overheating culpable is bad fans, if your fan makes noises like a tractor, you have to change it ASAP, when it stop making noise it is not because it is OK, it’s because it has stopped functioning altogether and is no longer pumping air in or out of your computer case.
In Figure 1 you can clearly see that the CPU cooler Fins under the Fan are completely blocked
The design of the air flow in a computer case is very important, overheat, even with today heat trip motherboard embedded sensors, can fatally disable the motherboard components. The thing is that the heat around the CPU rises slowly when the cooling fans become blocked by the accumulating dust. The heat rises by small increment & it takes months & even years for the sensors to be tripped and to finally trigger an alarm or an automatic shut down. When it finally has triggered the alarm it’s too late! The damage has already been done. All the components around the CPU are already cooked and we are beginning to resent the different effects, like inexplicable freezes, the slowing of the computer speed that no amount of tweaking can repair, strange software behavior and so on. One of the only physical traces of this overheating is on the Capacitors. The capacitor is
Figure 2 – Dry & Burst CPU Capacitors
a round cylinder placed at different places on the motherboard, this cylinder should be hermetically sealed & it encloses an electrolyte liquid that is essential to the good operation of the capacitor. Over the courses of months of overheating this liquid expand & shrink daily until it breaks the seals and begins to evaporate. Once all the electrolyte has evaporated the Capacitor is no longer functional and the computer endures catastrophic failures. Those failure not only cost you money but can even damage or wipeout your data!
In Figure 2 you can see the difference between a good capacitor on the right & two burst one in the middle, the seals are broken & you can even see that the leaking electrolyte has began to corrode the top of the capacitor.
Figure 3 – Dry & Burst GPU Capacitors
In Figure 3 you can observer that the damage is not occurring only on the motherboard but can be seen on a graphic card capacitor near the GPU.
In ninety percent of the cases of hardware failure in computer under 4 years of age the culprit is overheating of the components. Fifty percent of the time, Boards components are failing, the other fifty percents are equally divided between Hard Disk heat failure and Power Supply heat or fan failure. When a disk or PSU fails you can always replace them, but when your motherboard fails you have to replace your computer.
What to do about this will be the topic of one of my next Blogs.
In the mid time you can check my blog about the Huntkey T91 Case & bypass the airflow problem & be ready from the beginning.
