Have you cleaned your GPU lately?

I've had my 8800GTS for more than a year, and aside from occasional dusting not much had been done. I decided to do a through cleaning and replace TIM as the original may have started to dry out from near 24/7 use for so long.

And dang quite a bit of trapped dust inside. The white TIM that attached to RAM chips were almost like caulk, dry and somewhat crumbling. I also used compressed air to blow out dusts in the fins between the copper GPU block and the rear vent, a lot blew out. And the fan itself too.

I cleaned the RAM and GPU, applied fresh TIM paste, reassembled it and did a check. Idle temp has dropped a little bit so it was getting warmer than it should be at idle. Will check back after it's been cooking for an hour.

17 screws on G92 8800GTS BTW, 2 of them under product sticker so a bit of work to take it apart.

Have you cleaned yours lately? Even if you have a case with filters, some will get through like mine.

The TIM doesn't go bad. It would have been the same way if you replaced it the day you opened its box. That is the exact same sort of crap on the brand new cards I've pulled apart.

No not since I installed my Accelero 3 months ago, idle/load temps haven't gone up yet.

Oh yes... i cleaned out my 4870x2 a while ago and i swear it was actually a cat in the heat sinks....

Haha, I just cracked open my 8400GS to give it some new TIM for overclocking, and there was practically nothing on it. I was quite suprised to see that I was running this cacrd for 2 years without TIM. Thats why it was idling 60C

I replaced the tim twice on the 285 just to get with roughly 1C worse results than stock (there might be a reason why they put like 2mm thick on it).

After I put both my quadro and the 285 under water I did not touch them.