Pi in the Sky

Overheating and dust

Posted on September 11th, 2007 at 8:37pm by Pi.
Categories: Technology.

After my memory upgrade of yesterday, I got a couple of random crashes and resets. First I thought that the DIMM was bad, and I started a test using Memtest86. Then I realized that the only change I did besides putting a new DIMM was closing the computer case. It was a simple matter of overheating.

During summer I keep the case opened so the computer ventilates better. But if you close the case and you get crashes and resets due to overheating, then something is wrong. And what’s wrong? Well, simply stating: dust. All computers, wether they have the case opened or not, gather an uncanny amount of dust inside. There are a few places where dust accumulates more heavily, like the out grid of the power source, the dissipator beneath the CPU fan, and if the case is closed, any place where the air can go in or out, like open connection places, or even in the connections themselves if they allow air to pass.

Now one sees these dust walls around the places from where air goes in and out, and thinks “all that dust doesn’t allow the computer to ventilate well”, as if the physical barrier was all that matters. One blows a bit, removes those dust accumulations, and thinks that more or less the job is done. The fact is that dust is not much of a problem in that case, unless the dust balls really clog up the air entrances. Dust is more dangerous as a heat accumulator than as a physical barrier to the air.

Dust doesn’t really accumulate heat, it’s more that it heats up and colds down very slowly. So it takes a bit to get hot, but once it’s hot, it’s hard to cool it down. In certain places, like near the power source, and over the dissipator of the CPU, it accumulates enough heat to disturb the normal heat dissipation. Specially in the case of the CPU, it can cause abnormal fan function, and overheating. How much overheating? Well, I was getting crashes and resets at about 65 celsius, due to certain encoding I’m doing which makes use of 100% of CPU for a long time. After I dismounted the dissipator and fan, cleaned both properly, and placed them back, I ran the encoding for 2 hours again and the processor doesn’t go over 52 celsius.

In the past, when people said that they had computer overheating problems, and that their CPU fans weren’t functioning properly, I simply recommended a good dust cleaning session. In most cases, it was all that it needed. I even saw a kind of trend where people would say that something was wrong with their computers after more or less one year of purchase or installation, and the cleaning also solved the majority of the problems. Maybe sometimes the fan is wrecked for good, but properly cleaning everything is cheap and a good habit to have, before thinking in spending money to replace components. Remember, a clean computer is a happy computer.

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