Last weekend the clocks were switched to daylight saving time – spring is approaching. As every year, it is time for spring cleaning in many apartments and houses. A PC should also be maintained regularly, not only in terms of drivers and updates, but also in terms of the hardware and the housing. We’ll give you some tips for cleaning the PC, and it’s also about removing and installing the CPU cooler and the topic of thermal paste. We have also selected 42 air and water coolers for the CPU for you in a market overview. Because for one or the other, a thorough cleaning is a good opportunity to get and install a new cooler straight away.
Many users who have deliberately purchased a PC case with a transparent side panel install hardware that is particularly eye-catching. One or the other of these users will certainly clean the inside of the PC frequently, simply for representative reasons. But many let the PC do its work and only rarely or never use a few tools to clean the PC until they buy a new one. However, everyone should treat their PC to a cleaning once in a while, although there is no clear rule as to how often you should do this.
Although there are many housings that have dust protection grilles in the area of the fan mounting locations, these cannot keep out every speck of dust, and air and thus dust also get into the PC through other holes and cracks. In any case, sooner or later the PC will have caught so much dust that the cooling can suffer as a result. The possible consequence of this is that the fans have to rotate faster in order to comply with the temperature values for the CPU and GPU specified by the mainboard or the graphics card. So you get an unnecessarily loud PC as a result. If you don’t take care of the dust for years, you can even get temperature problems that cause the PC to downclock or even switch off. Defects are not to be expected, except in rather antique systems, since mainboards and graphics cards have certain protective mechanisms. But if the clock values are set down because of the heat development, you have less computing power available and you might not even notice it.
The dust protection grille, pushed aside, is completely dusty.
Source: Antonio Funes
The question of how often you should clean your PC depends on several factors. One thing is clear: if you can easily see a layer of dust and even see flakes of dust between the cooling fins of the cooling elements, it is overdue. Of course you can simply clean the PC once a year and set a fixed date for it, for example always on the first weekend in April. You can also do this twice a year, or just every two years. Because depending on the environment your PC is in, it will collect more or less dust per hour of operation. Therefore, the question of how many hours your PC runs on average per day also plays a role. If you use it often, mainly under load, you will collect the dust faster than an occasional user.
The question of how much air flow your ventilation generates is also important. Of course, the more it performs, the more dust can get into the PC. So if you intentionally let your ventilation run fast because you want the lowest possible temperature values for your CPU, the PC sucks in more dust per hour than if you have a ventilation system designed for quiet operation with slowly rotating fans. Either way, regardless of the dust, we recommend that you replace the thermal paste on your processor at least every three years. We’ll say a few more things about CPU coolers later – but the next page is about cleaning the PC first.
