Stupid Idea or Beneficial for PC Maintenance?

[jiyeon]

Hi, so as some of you may have caught on from my recent complaints regarding my PC and its dust issues, I've gotten to the point where I'm put off folding because of my CPU cooler and how must dust it consumes into its heatsink.

 

Here's some old images of mine that illustrate how my PC handles dust:
 

Front fan filter:

Spoiler

 

The heatsink itself:

Spoiler

 

It's disgusting and I'd rather not deal with this amount of build-up every week, and thus comes my question:

Would it be safe to run my CPU passively-cooled by the heatsink only where I remove the fan from the heatsink? I have all my case fan slots filled up so cooling should be sufficient even without a fan directly on the heatsink.

 

Thanks to my new Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut, I barely ever reach 50°C on my i5-8600K overclocked to 4.6GHz.

 

I don't CPU fold, so there in theory should be no problem with this, right?

[Jurrunio]

just keep an eye on CPU temperature while you go fanless. I only managed to get rid of dust on my cooler with one of those brushes for painting walls.

[Origami Cactus]

Technically this should be doable. But i wouldn't do it while overclocked or even at stock settings.

But i would downvolt and underclock the cpu just in case, disable turbo boost, maybe even disable a few cores so only 2 cores are active(i dont know if you can disable cores on intel cpus).

So then you would have a very underpowered cpu, which should be easily passively cooled. Also maybe have a warning if cpu reaches 80c, should be able to set warnings in bios.

When i had the i5 6600, i once limited it to 15w for laughs, and it was still usable.

[jiyeon]

1 minute ago, Origami Cactus said:

But i would downvolt and underclock the cpu just in case, maybe even disable a few cores so only 2 cores are active(i dont know if you can disable cores on intel cpus).

Yeah, I would probably go down to 3.5GHz if I decide to fold fanless, since my CPU is barely needed when my PC is folding anyway. I don't know how to disable cores but surely I can just do per-core clocking and set the last two cores to something lower like 3.2GHz, right?

[jiyeon]

5 minutes ago, Jurrunio said:

I only managed to get rid of dust on my cooler with one of those brushes for painting walls.

Fortunately I caught my dust soon enough that a simple tissue wipe and a blast of canned air did the trick. I count myself fortunate but my dad has spare paint brushes lying around should I need one.

[Origami Cactus]

4 minutes ago, seoz said:

Yeah, I would probably go down to 3.5GHz if I decide to fold fanless, since my CPU is barely needed when my PC is folding anyway. I don't know how to disable cores but surely I can just do per-core clocking and set the last two cores to something lower like 3.2GHz, right?

No idea about the per core clock speed, i havent touched an intel chip for a year or too.

I just know that in AMD bios there is an downcore option, where you just select how many cores you want active, the other cores are disabled. 

I would maybe even set the cores at 3.0ghz, should be still plenty fast for background tasks. Then you could downvolt, and ofcourse dont forget to disable the turbo boosting technologies.

[SupaKomputa]

Passively cooled? Why don't you test it, with or without fans.

Cpus are cooler these days.

I think the reason for a fan to be placed right on top of heatsink is to make sure all the heatsink surface are in direct contact with fast moving air.

And i don't think a 12mm case fan will produce the same air speed as the heatsink fan.

[jiyeon]

3 minutes ago, SupaKomputa said:

Passively cooled? Why don't you test it, with or without fans.

Cpus are cooler these days.

I think the reason for a fan to be placed right on top of heatsink is to make sure all the heatsink surface are in direct contact with fast moving air.

And i don't think a 120mm case fan will produce the same air speed as the heatsink fan.

I was about to test it, but wanted to make sure it was a bright idea that wouldn't burn my PC down, you see!

[corrado33]

You could also just use windows Power Management settings to "cripple" the CPU to say 70% or something. Should decrease power usage. 

[SupaKomputa]

5 minutes ago, seoz said:

I was about to test it, but wanted to make sure it was a bright idea that wouldn't burn my PC down, you see!

Naaah, the pc will shutdown itself before it burns down.

[Gorgon]

Wow! That's a lot of dust for just a few days. I run most of my systems in the unfinished portion of the basement and I only see that much dust after 3 - 6 months.

 

As @SupaKomputa said the thermal trips built into the processor will kick in if you start getting close to TjMax.

 

Folding using Nvidia on Windows will use up one thread or there abouts to keep the GPU.

 

So try the passive cooling but keep an eye on the temperature an remember that just underneath the cooler will be the GPU pumping out heat but the tests people have done with vertical versus horizontal GPU mounting seem to suggest with horizontal mounting most of the heat comes off the top of the card and if the chassis has adequate airflow it shouldn't warm up the air going past the cooler too much.