Cleaning the GPU Fan

Perhaps one of the big negative side of living in a hotter country like Bangladesh is that your computer or electronic devices would get warm really fast. This issue is particularly more prevalent during summer times. On top, there are issues with the amount of dust particles in the air of Dhaka city. This is exactly why lots of dust gets accumulated on top of any object that generally does not move.

Even if you keep your window open for regular air circulation inside your room, you will surely notice the same issue on the floor or even on your table. So, you can imagine what possibly can happen to your device if is running some sort of fan inside to cool the device. The air intake holes will be clogging up fast and the fan blades will be catching the dusts like magnet.

I am currently residing within a residential area where traffic movement is fairly low and not much construction work is taking place around me. I can not fathom living nearby any major city street in Dhaka, forget about the highways or places close to any construction sites. That would be a nightmare without any doubt.

In any case, for last couple of days I have noticed that the GPU temperature on my computer is constantly hovering around 50 to 60 degree Celsius or around 122 to 140 degree Fahrenheit. That did not sound normal to me. Also, note that I do not use any high end gaming GPU rather a professional grade GPU for day to day use. Occasionally playing some light games and doing some video editing related work. I simply could not understand why exactly the GPU will be running so hot when I am not doing any GPU heavy task.

Last night, I decided to open up the computer case and check what is going on. As soon as I opened up the case, I instantly noticed the clogged up GPU fan. Literally there were no open space in between the fan blades. Since the GPU had a shroud over the heat-sink, barely any air was going in to cool down the chip-set. No wonder why the GPU was getting so hot. Note that unlike gaming GPUs, these professional GPU does not come with large fan. They are fairly smaller in size so having dusts all over the fan blade basically limits the capacity to disperse the air.

I noticed pretty much the same issue with the low profile Noctua CPU cooler that I am using. I took the GPU out and brushed off all the dusts. For CPU cooling fan, I unscrewed the fan unit and cleaned it along with the metal heat-sink. I purchased a makeup brush way back for such cleaning purpose and it was handy this time around.

After spending few more minutes cleaning up the case, I put everything back together and turned the computer on to check the temperature. The task manager showed the temperature of my GPU to be around 40 degree Celsius or around 104 degree Fahrenheit which is something I can definitely live with without any further question.

I built this PC back in January of this year. When I brought this computer with me in Bangladesh, I had to take all the parts out from my previous case and re-build it over here on a different case that I purchased locally. So it's been working only for few months in Dhaka. Back in NYC, I used to do similar check ups after a year or so. The lesson here is, you should check your computer on regular basis regardless especially if you live in a area where clean air is not guaranteed.