Cooler cleaning procedure

[Markward_Franz]

Please encourage people to clean their CPU coolers every once in a while from dust. I know, this should be obvious, and probably is to most tech people. But should “normal” people get their hands on a framework machine, they should be taught about this.

[Ian_Darwin]

Agree. One time a colleague came to me with an overheating laptop and we blew air into the thing; the output was a remarkable dust cloud.

[Frosty]

Sometimes you just have to crack it open and clean it with some rubbing alcohol, tweezers, and wipes though. I’ve discovered with my brother’s PC that six years of compressed air cleaning can build an impressively impermeable mat of lint between the fan and heat sink if you don’t complement it with regular normal servicing.

[Michael_Wu]

Old thread, but leaving this here in case it helps others.

A guide/some anecdata for completely cleaning the fan without removing the entire heatsink so that one doesn’t have to disturb the thermal material under the heatsink:

@Michael_Wu

I finally got around to this, and swapped my Intel i7-1165G7 board back in to retest. The board with PTM7950 has been in use from ~July 2022 to early November 2023, so well over a year. Initially, I thought I had cleaned out all the dust (there was a lot), ran all the tests in my original post again, and was seeing over ~5C hotter temps (10C at the extreme, at high power). I was puzzled, and thought my PTM7950 application had degraded. Then, I rechecked by partially taking off the fan cover, and lo and behold there was more dust. I cleaned that off, reran the tests, and temps were back to how they were originally!

The area in the green boxes [a] are easy to see and clean dust from. However, the area in the red box [b] is hard to get to and clean:

And I did not want to remove the entire heatsink for the risk of damaging my precious PTM7950 application. So to avoid that, I took out the entire mainboard, unscrewed these 2 screws (yellow boxes [s]) on the front side:

as well as these 3 screws (yellow boxes [s]) on the back side. Afterwards, the area in the blue box [bmc] is still attached to the heatsink via a bent metal clasp? which didn’t look like it could be easily undone without breaking:

I kept the rest of the heatsink assembly screwed in/attached to the mainboard.

Finally, with all those screws undone, the fan can be gently pushed out enough so that the bottom of that hard to reach area (red box [b]) is revealed:

If you zoom in, you can see that there’s dust blocking the fins and yes, it doesn’t look like much. But little amount was causing an increase of 5-10C! I had already removed a ton of dust from the green boxes, so my temps must’ve been even much higher. I definitely noticed an increase in fan load/noise during regular usage (but let it be), and am confident it was the dust. Now I wonder if the increased fan load led to a decrease in battery life because:

@Adrian_Joachim

The fan at full blast uses almost 2W of power

After I cleaned that area (very easy to do with a cotton swab and some alcohol, or carefully with water) and reassembled, temps dropped back to how they originally were on day 1 PMT7950. Yay!