Lowering the temperature of my pc I built my own pc and it has pretty standard fans etc. Every few months it suddenly starts switching off midway through use, even when not doing very much at all. Usually I need to open it up, get a fucking hoover onto it and remove as much dust as possible. After this I can do most things without a problem at all. Except play computer games. They will play fine for a while before my computer screen displays some very odd screwed up graphics and crashes... then turns off. I'm pretty sure this is due to overheating, I've got some extremely cheap standard and noisey as fuck fans in there which are no doubt a joke and likewise, the case seems to do an extremely shit job of keeping the dust out in the first place. So do any of you have any ideas as to what I can do? Are there higher quality, but more quiet fans available which would cool it - and then would there be any sort of way to completely stop that fucking dust from getting inside? And removing it. Special cases? Some way to remove dust from the parts? Help me cool it please - and keep that dust out. Thanks x
You can get dust filters and dust lining you can place over the vents to your PC to stop dust getting in but sadly you'll always end up with some inside your case. Dust will always impede the airflow but it depends on how large your case is as to whether it'll have any real effect. I'd download Everest Home (google for it) and see what the current temperature is inside your case/cpu/hdd. Some simple things you can do to cool it down - tidy all of your cables and try to get as much free space inside the case as possible. If you're running with more than one hard drive, try spacing them out inside the case if you can. Check that there is plenty of thermal paste between the CPU and the heatsink - this conducts the heat between the two and if there's none there it makes a big difference. Make sure your fans are blowing air in the right direction - you should have your case pulling fresh air in at the front and spitting hot air out at the back. If none of this works, you should look at different coolers for your CPU and possibly your graphics card. A decent heatsink is always better than a cheap one. From experience I'd recommend a Zalman or Arctic cooler. Try and get fans with a low noise rating - Just because you want it cool, doesn't mean you want it to sound like a jet taking off www.overclockers.co.uk is always a good place to start if you're looking for coolers, it might be worth looking at a graphics card cooling kit as well.
theres loads of options, depending on how much coin you wanna spend, if you want no noise and decent colling with no dust get a reserator water cooler, or if you wanna stick with air get a zalman cnp900 or whatever theyre called, full copper cooler with a decent fan. its always better to go with bigger fans aswell, they have better air dispersal rates and also make less noise, depends what your case can handle. like someone said keep your cables tight and out of the way of airflow,best practice is tie raps tieing the cables to the chassis using the holes in the plate where your motherboard goes. there are other coolers you can get, TEC ones are quite good, more expensive than normal heatsink setups but are slightly better, quite dangerous if they fail because of the way they work.
Not really bothered how much I spend (to a certain degree). I don't want to spend stupid amounts on some kind of super-coolers for nerds who like to push their pc's to the absolute extreme. I'd get water cooling, but would it be obsolete when I come to upgrade my pc? Are these so pointlessly none-interchangable as RAM/motherboards a couple of years down the time or are they quite universal? I think that the main problem lies within the fact that when I bought it, I bought pretty sub-standard £4 fans because they had pretty blue LEDS. Can certain cases effectively keep all the dust out? Mine has quite a few exposed areas that no doubt let loads of the stuff in. Also, I've never quite understood how you can get optimum airflow (what is the correct term for this again? Was reading an article a while back). If I had four places to stick four fans, pushing air in the same direction then surely I can't have much influence over anything at all.
I've just checked and all 3 of my case fans are sucking air in, which apparently is not good. So I don't have any fans pushing the air back out. As you can see from the photos I've just taken and uploaded, I have labelled Fan 1 at the front, Fan 2 at the back and Fan 4 on the side. Fan 3 is empty because I broke it, but I'm going to cover that hole up today to stop dust getting in. ALL of these are pulling air in. Now on this photo you can see the fan that covers the CPU and I have also labelled the graphics card, which has two fans pointing downwards. Bearing this in mind, can any of you who seem to have more of an idea than me please tell me which fans I should reverse to push some of the air back out the case? and would it be worth replacing Fan 3, swapping it with 4 or having either of them there in the first place? I'm also going to get better fans, but it's pointless if the airflow is all messed up (I didn't know that you could simply reverse the fans to make them blow another way). Thankyou very much. x
That's what I figured so I turned it round earlier and gave the graphics card a well needed dust down. It's lost 30 degrees whilst playing games now. CPU is still at 80, think I need a better fan for that. Cheers.
yeah just purchase a cheap heat sink for the fucker, and/or posh cooling equipment, should sort that right out
