Three hours of my life gone because I forgot to clean the fan blades

Pulled my old gaming laptop apart last weekend because it was hitting 95C on just the desktop. Figured it was dried out paste like always. Spent a good 45 minutes scraping old thermal goop off the CPU and GPU, applied fresh stuff, reassembled everything. Booted it up and the temps dropped maybe 2 degrees. That annoyed me big time so I tore it all down again and started checking the heatsink pipes for blockages. Nothing. Then I looked closer at the fans and realized they were caked with this thick layer of dust fuzz that had basically turned into felt. Like 2mm thick on both fans. Cleaned them with a toothbrush and compressed air, put it back together a third time. Dropped straight to 72C under load. So yeah that three hour job was mostly just me not looking at the obvious first.

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evan1512mo ago

2mm thick of dust fuzz that basically turned into felt"? That's insane, I can't believe you didn't notice that just looking at the laptop before you even took it apart.

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