Saturday, February 2, 2013

Dust My Arch Nemesis!

I do not know what it is about this apartment, but dust is pervasive, and almost sadistic in this place.   Those of you that know my other interests, know I am rather into Tea and Teaware, and I thought it was bad just to consistently clean my teaware display, which seems to always be getting coated in dust.

Well that build up on the teaware should just be a hint at what is getting sucked into my computers.  The Dust vents are the number one clue of what is really going on in my computers.  So today my mission if I choose to accept it is to try and clean these vents to help keep my computers cool.

Sadly neither of the front panels to my computer have removable dust screens, so I went with the trusty power down and vacuum clean the front.  It was mostly cosmetic on my newest system, as that has been running incredibly cool the entire time I have had it.  The machine that caused concern was my old Optiplex.

Opening it up and really inspecting airflow has me a bit worried.  As the only fan inside the case is a specialized fan meant to funnel air from the front past the huge heatsink for the CPU.   This partially explains why the GPU has been running so toasty, and it may be to early to judge, but I do think my efforts were not completely in vein.

After being on and crunching for nearly 15 minutes My GPU is mostly levelled off at 92C  Which is not quite the improvement I was hoping for of getting it sub 90's ( it has been idling at 95-96C).    I will need to consider what I am going to do with this GPU, as while its Max recommended temp is 100C, I do not feel comfortable running a processor so close to its max recommended temp consistently.  I hate to say this but I may turn this into a machine just for crunching CPU projects and a media center for movies and what not.

Not to mention at night it sounds like it is getting in a fan noise fight with my Laptop when both are crunching away at full force, and I think its starting to get to me and alter my sleep.  So I am now in fan of saving a bit of energy and powering down my loudest systems each night.

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