Clean that heatsink, genius

All those who know me also know that I'm mortally afraid of touching any piece of computer hardware. Out of the last 10 times I toyed with my machine's insides, I screwed it up 7 times. So when my PC started running 7 degrees above the expected temperature lately, I knew the best thing I could do was pray. Now, 7 degrees above normal is a bit too much for a Prescott, that's my processor, and it cleanly destroys any possibilities of me gaming without an overheating alarm throughout, or worse, a fried chip. This has kept me from gaming for about four months now.

I've been looking for alternate ways of cooling a computer without having to void any warranties.

Yesterday I noticed huge blobs of dirt set firmly within the fins of the processor heatsink. I guessed it was in someway responsible for this extra heat. Yesterday I also downloaded a software that's supposed to send repeated sleep signals to the CPU so that the processor heats less at the obvious expense of performance. At 2.8 GHz that's acceptable.

In fact, for a long time I had been looking for a way to cap my processor performance so that it heats less. This software doesn't exactly do that, but the effect is similar.

After installing the sofware and running it I noticed a drop of about 2 degrees in the temperature. All the temperature measurements were done using Intel Active Monitor, the stock motherboard software. Some people like using Motherboard Monitor but the former works fine for me.

Later, after repeated debates with self, I decided to clean that heatsink and see if it had an effect. Armed with an old toothbrush and a pen refill I set out on the job and removed large volumes of something that resembled cotton, only black in colour. Took me about 20 minutes to do that.

Switching on the PC then, I re-enabled the sound alert and launched Quake III: Arena. If it gave a temperature warning now, I would have to quit gaming till winters. But thankfully I played two straight games without any warning. I checked the temperature during the game and surprisingly it was 6 degrees lower than the earlier idle temperatures. It could not get better than this.

So as the scene now is, I can play all the games now without having to worry about temperature. This is a huge relief as I'm finally going to do some justice to my card. Only, I think I lost my image of MotoGP 2 so will have to look for it first.

One more thing, wierdly enough, the computer now runs hotter if I use the cooling software.











A standard prescott heatsink (like mine)















A dirty heatsink (not a prescott one)