Free PC - Cleaning Tips please

[UrbanFreestyle]

Hi All,

So i have been given a PC foc. i'm actually thinking this is a decent machine but a little unsure about the best cleaning methods. It's an old rig, VERY dusty inside, despite having filters.

I'm not sure that using air duster would be the best idea as it could force dust further inside the parts?

System specs below:

Spoiler

Asus Z97-K

Intel Core i7 4790K

Noctua NH-U14S

16gb 2133 Corsair Vengeance Pro DDR3

GeForce GTX 960

Corsair CS550M 500w

250gb 850 Evo SSD

1x 2tb Seagate Barracuda

Carbide 330R Titanium

 

[NinJake]

If you want a thorough clean. Take it apart and use compressed air everywhere. Put it back together. Otherwise just use compressed air as is but you won't be able to easily clean the case fans and cpu cooler fans.

[KuJoe]

Lots of isopropyl alcohol.

[LukeSavenije]

do you have a compressor?

[Fasauceome]

Take each individual piece, hose down heat sinks, use isopropyl to clean all thermal compound and repaste, blow all the fans and wipe them with paper towels.

 

Don't use a vacuum, it can create static charge 

[emosun]

q-tips for the tiny hard to reach areas.I always use them to clean fans

[SenKa]

How I do it:

 

Pressurized air to blow out heatsinks, motherboards, GPU's.

 

Garden hose to clean the case.

 

Filthy case fans are usually trashed. The bearings will go with dust packed in them. That PC is an absolute steal for free.

[aisle9]

44 minutes ago, UrbanFreestyle said:

Hi All,

So i have been given a PC foc. i'm actually thinking this is a decent machine but a little unsure about the best cleaning methods. It's an old rig, VERY dusty inside, despite having filters.

I'm not sure that using air duster would be the best idea as it could force dust further inside the parts?

System specs below:

 

First off, holy sh*t, I wish people would give me PCs like that.

 

Second, cleaning. See below. Not every step may be necessary. If dust is your only enemy, you can skip over some of this.

1. Disassemble the PC entirely, piece by piece. You can leave the CPU in the board, but everything else comes out.
2. Using isopropyl alcohol, get the old thermal paste (which is probably thermal cement now) off of your CPU and cooler.
3. If you have something like a Datavac or X-Arrow, use it to blast the inside of your case. If you don't have one, use compressed air and consider buying one. Once finished, scrub the case out with a brush to loosen what's left, then blast it again. If your case doesn't have any I/O attached to it or that I/O can be safely removed, the bare metal frame can be hosed down and left to dry for a couple of days instead of all this scrubbing and air blasting.
4. Use compressed air to blast loose dust off of the motherboard. You will likely need a soft paintbrush to wipe away what's left. "Soft" is the key word here. A scratch on your motherboard's PCB could be an instant RIP. When you're finished, be sure to go back over it blasting dust out of spaces like RAM slots, the 24-pin PSU connector, SATA ports, etc. Anywhere that dust could enter during cleaning and cause a problem later. Once finished, hit the board with compressed air one more time, and focus on the area around the CPU socket which is usually the biggest PITA to get clean.
5. Remove the fan(s) from your CPU cooler and blast it with compressed air to get most of the loose dust, then run the heatsink under your sink to get the dust out. This will need to dry for a day or so before I'd reinstall it.
6. If you're feeling daring or have experience, taking apart the GPU to repaste and clean it will help with noise and temperature. If you can't get the GPU heatsink cleaned out, you can run it under tap water to get the dust loosened and out of there, but under no circumstances should anything but the actual metal heatsink be anywhere near water. Again, the heatsink will need to dry for a day.
7. Flick the blades on each fan to spin them up a bit. If they don't spin evenly or there's any kind of clicking noise, throw them away. Then, clean your remaining fans. You can do this with compressed air and a toothbrush, or you can do it with your sink. If you choose to use your sink, be sure to keep the fan blades under the water facing down so that water runs away from the motor. You're going to get some water in there no matter what, but by keeping the tap flow light and angling fan blades down you can minimize it. Stand the fans up at about a 45-degree angle when finished so any water in the motor naturally flows out of it, and let the fans dry for at least two days. The safe alternative is to use a dry brush and compressed air, which avoids the possibility of water damage but takes a lot longer in terms of actual cleaning time and effort. I have never lost a fan by cleaning it with water, but ymmv and this is not a guaranteed safe method.
8. Clean your PSU. In most cases, you just want to get some compressed air in there to blow it out. Your PSU will continue to be dirty, but you'll be alive. If you're daring and you know what you're doing, you can remove the PSU from its case and give it a thorough blasting with compressed air. Do not touch any of the PSU's components--there's more than enough juice in there to kill you if the caps are charged.
9. Brush your RAM with the same brush you used for the motherboard. You can hit this with compressed air too, but the brush method usually works better for me.
10. Hit your hard drive with compressed air, then brush it if needed.
11. If you used any water at all, put everything aside for two days to dry. If you managed to get water onto a PCB somehow, give it a week.
12. Reassemble your parts, starting with the GPU, then rebuild your motherboard with cooler and RAM.
13. Before putting your whole rig back together, bench test it to make sure everything survived the cleaning. The only hardware I've ever lost during cleaning was old stuff that was on the brink of death anyway. AM2, LGA 775, Socket 478, that sort of stuff. I've never killed anything "modern" (post-2009) by cleaning it.
14. When your system boots right into Windows, power everything down and rebuild it inside your case. Congratulations, shiny new PC.

You're looking at a solid 6 hours or so of cleaning if you do every step dry. If the case is full of tobacco and nicotine residue, it could be on the order of days and you'll never get that smell out of the PSU. If your case isn't that dirty or you just want it passably clean, you can skip some of the deeper clean steps. It's a long process, but the beautiful, clean as new PC you come out of it with is worth the effort.

[UrbanFreestyle]

Thanks for all the replies, 

So this was an old video editing rig from an office and was going for weee so I rescued it. 

Mom happy to redo the thermal pastes on gpu and cpu so that should help. I was tempted to pull my 8th gen rig apart to add an m.2 and some more spinning storage. 

Thanks for all the information, tbh I hadn’t really thought about washing heatsink a in the sink before so will give that a go. I’m pretty confident building and stripping kit but not sure if it would just be a better option to change over my PSU while I’m at it as I have a 1000w g3 sat here doing nothing.