Cleaning your CPU cooler is a little trickier. We firmly subscribe to the “if it ain’t
broke, don’t fix it” school of thought, so we generally recommend against dis-
connecting the cooler from the system. However, if you can’t clean the cooler
when it’s mounted to your mobo, you can remove it. Blasting the dust from dirty
CPU coolers has given us hefty cooling improvements in the past.
We recommend holding a paper towel on one side of the CPU cooler and
blowing compressed air at it from the other side. While this isn’t totally effective
at keeping dust from spreading to other areas of your case, it makes it easy to
see where the dust is going and is definitely better than doing nothing. Once
you’ve pushed all of the dust out of your cooler’s fins, you should start working
on the fan and the exterior of the cooler with an alcohol-soaked paper towel.
When you’re cleaning the fan, be very careful not to push down on the blades
with too much force. You don’t want to break the fan by bending its shaft.BLAST YOUR CPU FAN AND COOLER
april 2007 MAXIMUMPC 49
how (^2) ImprovIng your pc experIence, one step at a tIme
The next component on Felix Unger’s tour
of your PC is the videocard. You’ll want to
pull your videocard (or videocards) from
your system to give the fans a good going
over. If your card sports one of those fancy
two-slot coolers—complete with heat pipe
and air shroud—you’re going to want to
affix the straw to your canned air’s nozzle
and use it to blow all the dust out of the
end of the air tunnel.
If your card has a standard cooler, you’ll
still want to take a look at it with your flash-
light and make sure you blow the dust off
of the fins. It’s fairly simple to do, but if you
miss any large chunks of grime, you can
actually make your GPU cooling situation
worse by blocking airflow when you previ-
ously had no problems.
Once you’ve blown the dust off, take a
look at the fan blades and the rest of the
card. Using your alcohol-moistened paper
towel, wipe the fan blades down and clean
off any other dust you see. Leave the vid-
eocards out of your case for the time being.
CLEAN YOUR VIDEOCARD
Gunked-on grime can be challenging to remove. You
may need to use some rubbing alcohol and a paper
towel to get your fan blades clean.
Before you can clean your videocard,
you’ll need to remove it from its slot.
It’s rarely necessary to remove your motherboard to make your
machine look right, but anyone who’s upgraded an older machine
knows that the area under a motherboard is usually smothered in dust.
True, it’s not critical to clean it out, and no one else will know it’s filthy
under there. But if you’re a completist, it’s only a moderate pain in the
ass to clean out the nether regions beneath your mobo; all you need to
do is disconnect all the cables, unscrew the mobo, and remove it from
the case. Once you’ve done that, wipe down the bottom of the case to
get the dust out.
With the cables disconnected, it’s a good time to give them a quick
once-over; the SATA and PATA cables are the worst culprits for dust
and grime collection. Take your alcohol-moistened towel and run it
along each cable. This will remove dust buildup and leave them look-
ing brand new. Finally, pull your memory and give the heat spreaders
REMOVE AND CLEAN YOUR MOBO
Compressed air comes back into play with
the GPU cooler. Give the cooler a few quick
blasts to clear away dust.
We like to take a moment or two to give our cables a good
cleaning. It won’t make your rig faster, but it will look better!