My PC makes a seasonal migration: to the basement during the summer, to the living room in the winter. Those moves provide an opportunity to vacuum the fuzz out of the fan grilles and heatsinks.
You’d think that, given the trouble caused by blocked air inlets, manufacturers would make it easy to get access to the grilles and trivially easy to remove the fuzz. Not so, alas.
This time, I decided to see what the intake side of the main heatsink looked like. Two screws secure the shell to the circuit board and provide clamping pressure on the CPU heat spreader. The heatsink is a massive affair with liquid-filled heat pipes; I’ve never taken it out before because removing the screws exposes the CPU heat spreader, where you do not want to get fuzz.
Oops!
A bit of work with the vacuum and a brush greatly improved the situation. I think I kept the fuzz out of the heatsink-to-CPU joint, but there’s really no way to know because, as nearly as I can tell, Dell didn’t include any of the CPU temperature readouts on this system board.
Memo to Self: Gotta do that more often …
The Smell of Molten Projects in the Morning 
Comments
4 responses to “CPU Heatsink Fuzz”
I just did this last night after the computer overheated and forcefully shut down… I should be more careful. However, taking the shop vac to the insides didn’t do the trick as well as blasting it with the air compressor. The resulting cloud of dust was overwhelming.
The resulting cloud of dust was overwhelming.
Man, I hate it when that happens!
Your lungs should clean the finest of the dust out of the air pretty quickly, though… [grin]
I was taught to vacuum machine tools, never blow ’em off with compressed air (which can drive the chips past seals). I follow the same rule with computers. I’ve always worried about ESD, but I’ve yet to kill anything with a shop vac and the brush attachment.
Indeed; blasting razor-edged swarf all over the shop strikes me as a bad idea… but I still haven’t gotten around to permanently installing the compressor, so I don’t have that temptation.
I generally put the vac nozzle inside a PC, then use an acid brush (or something similar) to dislodge the crud. The vac sucks up the fines pretty well, so the air stays clean, and the larger chunks get inhaled when I make a final pass around the innards.
That doesn’t get the fuzz out of the heatsink fins, though. This heatsink has really deep fins and I gave up after getting the major fuzzball out of the way. With any luck, that’ll induce enough airflow to keep it happier; it was running OK with the thing completely clogged, which is a Good Sign.
I suppose the design process says that the PC will be obsolete by the time it dies a dusty death, so there’s no real problem…