here at Linus media group we believe in cleanliness which
okay so you guys weren't gonna believe that fine so sometimes our stuff gets
dirty and when it does we always clean it up right away which
okay you weren't gonna buy that either were you okay well how about this one
when our graphics cards get so caked up with dust and gunk that gaming
performance and cooling suffers or they get louder we finally break out the
cleaning supplies to restore them to their original glory you still with me
alright so let's do that then
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so let's start by introducing our graphics cards i actually wanted to find
ones that were a little bit dirtier than this but my cry for filthy graphics
cards on twitter didn't yield any results that were any better than the
two old bitcoin mining cards that taryn had at his house so i went with those of
the two the 5870 with the rear exhaust cooler seemed like the better bet to
demonstrate the usefulness of cleaning out a graphics card since its design
causes there to be a small difficult to access potential bottleneck inside the
shroud that can essentially prevent air from getting through the heatsink
by contrast the 6870 has a very open
cooler design that is both difficult to gunk up and easy to access for cleaning
so for step one we need to get a baseline reading of how the card is
doing so we're going to throw on the latest drivers and use a gamer
application that puts a predictable load on the graphics card so i used the
skyboxing crisis 3 right here and then
using MSI afterburner i was able to load up the key performance metrics for this
test on screen GPU temperature and fan
speed percentage so we ended up with values of 74 degrees at 39 percent fan
speed at max step two is going to be to take the card
off and then add a safe clutter free static free workstation or at least
outside begin the cleaning process now the easiest fastest way to clean out a
card is to use a duster can like this and blow out the areas you can reach
make sure you hold the fan still so that it doesn't over spin because that'll
burn out the header it's attached to and don't turn the can upside down
because that's going to blow residue junk all over your card which could
potentially harm it in the long term with that done we can throw it back on
the bench and find out if that actually
did anything all right so our duster can didn't make
a lick of difference with peaks of 74 degrees and 39 percent fan speed so that
means one of two things either the card
is clean enough as it is and required no cleaning in spite of its grungy outward
appearance or number two we weren't able
to get enough dust and hair yes hair is a major concern for pet owners out to
make a difference so it's time to step up our game remove the card from the
bench again and this time you'll need a tool kit start by removing the screws
from the back of the card being careful to label them for when you inevitably
put it back together make sure when you're taking out the four screws
directly behind the GPU that you remove them in a cross pattern to avoid putting
extra pressure on one side of the fragile GPU die
some coolers also have screws in the rear pci cover that will prevent the
cooler from being removed so watch out for those
with the screws off you can pull the back plate off the card if applicable
then flip it over and pull the cooler off the front of the card then remove
the fan connector be careful not to lose
or dirty any of the thermal pads on the bottom of the heatsink during this step
you will need them for reassembly and they cannot be replaced with regular
thermal compound as you can see this
doesn't really give us any better access than we already had to the inside of the
cooler and it's at this point that the details of this how-to guide will differ
somewhat depending on which card you happen to have so the next step is to
disassemble the cooler itself by pulling out basically all the screws you can
find labeling them of course and then popping it apart to reveal the heatsink
fins that are usually attached to some kind of a solid copper or vapor chamber
base in modern cards we can see now that our card falls into
the former just not that dirty in spite of its outward appearance category of
cards whose cooling performance doesn't improve from being blown out but
since we're in here we might as well take another run with our blower can
anyway reassembling the card is as simple as
doing everything you just did in reverse with one addition make sure you put some
new thermal compound on the GPU just a little bit will do the trick
and then with the card reassembled we get our final results 73 degrees and 37
fan speed a marginal improvement to be
sure and one that's as likely to be to do with replacing the stock thermal
compound as removing those two baby dust bunnies that we did from our cooler but
that doesn't take anything away from the instructional value of this video so if
your GPU is running hotter than before try out this guide before you junk it
because especially more modern cards can
not only run cooler and last longer but can actually run faster thanks to clock
boosting technologies that activate only when the card is below a certain thermal
and acoustic threshold speaking of acoustic thresholds do you
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audiobooks all right that's it thanks for watching
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