 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. Intel's new 750 series SSDs utilize the NVMe standard, providing speeds never seen before on consumer storage drives. Click right here to learn more. 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 Taron 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 game or application that puts a predictable load on the graphics card. So I used the skybox in Crysis 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% fan speed at max. Step two is going to be to take the card off and then at 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 overspin, 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% 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 heat sink 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 heat sink 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 hear that? It sounds like Audible.com, the leading provider of audiobooks with more than 180,000 downloadable titles across all types of literature, including fiction, nonfiction, both fiction and nonfiction. Wow, that's basically everything. Oh, and also periodicals. Audiobooks are great to listen to when you're driving, stuck in traffic. I guess that's also technically driving. On the subway, I guess that's also technically traffic. I've only actually told you two things just now. Anyway, don't worry too much about it. Doing chores around the house at the gym, doing errand shopping or whatever. And for our audience members, Audible is offering a free audiobook to give you a chance to try out their service. Actually, it's available for everyone, but if you use our link, then yeah, we get credit for it. If you're a Star Wars fan and you can't wait for the new movie to come out, you can listen to titles like Lords of the Sith written by Paul S. Kemp and narrated by Jonathan Davis. And if you aren't that into Star Wars, then don't worry. They have lots of other stuff, too. Loser. So to download the audiobook of your choice for free, visit Audible.com slash Linus and try out their membership. It gives you an audiobook every month to listen to and entitles you to other perks like discounts on additional audiobooks. All right, that's it. Thanks for watching, guys. Like it if you liked it, dislike it if you disliked it. Leave a comment, preferably at the forum link in the video description if you have comments. Also, we linked in the video description. You can contribute to us if you like our videos and you want us to make more. You can change your Amazon bookmark to one with our affiliate code. If you want to buy a graphics card and you want us to get a small kickback when you do that. And as always, don't forget to subscribe and follow and all of that good stuff. Thanks again for watching.