If you have a gaming Pc how often should you dust components

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Sweetleaf
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12 Sep 2024, 12:56 am

I am a bit new to it, I have a gaming pc and have had it for a few months now and when I look in the clear side I cannot see any dust on conponents, but I have heard from time to time you may have to open the case to blow air-duster to get rid of any dust. But so far does not seem there is any dust in the PC so has not became nessisary to do that but idk if you are supposed to do it periodically in general regardless of how much dust or if it more when it has visible dust you should blow it out.

So yeah is it a maintnence thing one should do every so often or is it more something to be done when you notice visible dust. Cause I have been periodically looking at the inside of my PC from the clear side and so far no dust has really collected inside of it so far so has not seemed necessary to clean it. But is that normal or should I be air dusting it more often even if it does not have visible dust? cause I want to keep it functioning well but I don't want to do anything that would harm the components. But also, not sure of all the right ways to really take care of a PC I guess.


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uncommondenominator
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12 Sep 2024, 1:15 am

If it ain't dusty, or barely any dust, don't dust it. If it's visibly, noticeably dusty, give it a cleaning.

I go a year or two or three between a good case cleaning.

If the dust is too thin to see, it's too thin to do harm. Mostly you don't want clumps of it clogging fans or heatsink fins on the CPU cooler, or video card cooler, if you have one. Mild dust is fairly harmless.



Last edited by uncommondenominator on 12 Sep 2024, 1:38 am, edited 1 time in total.

Carbonhalo
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12 Sep 2024, 1:34 am

Unless you're overclocking or living in death valley most PCs will tolerate quite a crust over most components.
Places to watch are the CPU fan and the video card fan (and chipset fan if there is one)
The power supply fan could also bear observation.
I'm always wary of compressed air on fans and try to stop them rotating whilst getting blasted.
I rather doubt they could spin fast enough to generate enough EMF to cook the drivers, but why risk it?



gwynfryn
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22 Sep 2024, 6:33 am

Dust settles when air flow i insuficient, so it'sunlikely to be a problem in a ventilated box. Keyboards are another issue, and benefit from vacuum cleaning, followed by anantistatic wand for the whole,if appearence bothers you.



pcgoblin
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09 Oct 2024, 11:42 am

I dust mine when I notice the front grill becoming gray with dust. Today for instance. This can be about every four months.

I read that one is not suppose to use air blowers (can air, for instance) to blow into fans because it wears the bearings. That explains a few things, although I always enjoyed hearing that whirl sound of the blades spinning. So I hold them in place now.

Here are a couple deep cleaning videos I just found. He cleans more thoroughly than I do. I have cleaned beyond vacuuming and blowing air when I need to replace a worn component. They are both about twenty minutes long. I've never dismantled my graphics card for cleaning. This is Monk level cleaning.

Deep-Cleaning a Viewer's DIRTY Gaming PC! - PCDC S2:E1

How To PROPERLY Deep-Clean PC Fans



ToughDiamond
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21 Oct 2024, 8:50 am

If it's not dirty, don't clean it. If it is dirty, clean it.

Me, I'd feel wary of taking the risk of opening the box and poking about in there, but I'd probably take a look - a long time ago a desktop computer died on me, and if I hadn't been so risk-averse about those things, I'd probably have saved it. So these days I'd very likely take a look.