Cooling Have you cleaned your heatsink today?

Sorry for the craptastic photo, it was taken on my phone and I don't have a particularly steady hand.
Anyway, that's a stock Intel cooler with just less than a year of running in this system, note how clogged with dust the fins are, it's a wonder that it hadn't burnt up and died but surprisingly the temps weren't much over 50C under load (and about 35C idle) in this condition. Either that's testament to how good the stock cooler actually is by way of the fact that it keeps running or that I have sufficient airflow in my case.
Idle is now about 25C (according to speedfan and the BIOS) and I've yet to check load, but I can assume its quite a bit better than it was

Sure it's not as bad as some smokers systems but it serves as perhaps a quick reminder to everyone to whip your case side off and have a quick spring clean when you get the time, and by doing so protecting that cpu and graphics card that you've invested £xxx's into

 

Ewwwww. That's one dusty house. Got dust filters on your case fans? They help a lot.

 

I clean mine out every month, with the dust filters I have a very clean PC

 

Clean mine yearly. Not looking forward to March!

 

dust filters Cheesecake (F-T-W will be cheesecake again..... )

i clean my dust filter evey fortnight, but for any heatsink? probably 2 month or so...... did a re-sit it the other day, wasn't much dust on the TRUE120, but GTX is a bit dusty

 

Filters + can of compressed air every 3months WIN

 

I wash the filters of my P180 pretty much every time I open the door (which seems to happen about every two weeks). Lately also cleaned the cooler of the 8600GTS as I was about to sell it.. Surprisingly little amount of dust there. CPU-cooler seemed to be pretty dusty, but I'm just too lazy to remove and clean it.

 

You'll have to show how clean it is after a few months of Summer Fresh!

 

I will doug..
As for the filters thing, I have no filter points in my old Chieftec so for now, it's sheets of bounty (tumble dryer sheets) being used as makeshift filters, they seem to be a little too dense though so I may have to ghetto it up a little with some old pairs of tights or something.
If nothing else at least the air being pushed around in there now smells all tumble dryer fresh

 

Mine looks like that after a month, but then I'm a heavy smoker

 

Actually yeah I did clean mine today. Took the fans off the heatsinks in my server and gave them a clean, quite a bit of dust for only 7 days running.

 

kept the room clean and pc off the floor.

 

Dang, I wish I had seen this thread a couple days ago! I cleaned my computer, and I had a mat of dust on my XP-120 heatsink. I literally just peeled it off in a sheet. I keep my computer on the floor, with an open case side, because it overheats otherwise, and it's under my dusty desk, so it gets GROSS. I really need to clean it more often.

 

Filters = win indeed. Checked mine for the first time in 6 months and boy, I was glad it was there.

 

how about a chair for the computer to sit on?

(sorry about the orientation)