How To Clean The Graphics Card?

When your graphics card is too old or has serious cooling problems, it is advisable to completely disassemble it and clean its interior. In this article, we will teach you how to clean the graphics card of your PC step by step.

When Should I Clean My Graphics Card?

Obviously, there is no set period in which it is ‘mandatory’ to clean it. Rather, it depends on the user, the specific model, and the conditions in which said graph has been. Anyway, we leave you with some signs that could indicate that it is time to do it, or rather to check if everything is going well with the temperatures of your GPU :

1. The temperature of the graphics in games is higher than normal. For example, if your graph used to be 70 or 75 degrees at maximum load, and now it is much hotter than normal. Theirs is that from time to time you check that everything is going well in the temperatures. Nor is it a matter of obsessing over it.
2. Taking a look at the graphics card or even the interior of your PC in general, you notice a large accumulation of dust that suggests that the graphics would have serious problems cooling properly.
3. It could also be a cause of crashes, reboots, or performance drops in games or other programs. Although there are a million causes of this type of problem, the temperature of the graph is a factor to consider. The next point teaches you to know the temperature of your graph.

How To Disassemble And Clean The Graphics Card?

If you have decided to clean your graphics card, let’s go with it.

There is a wide variety of assemblers and models on the market, each one is different and has its own way of opening the graphics card. We have done it with a Sapphire R9 380X Nitro, and we are going to show you a process that is usually similar in most graphics cards, but there are differences between many models. For example, the most recent ones usually provide facilities to remove the fans and clean them. We recommend that you support yourself with a disassembly video for your exact model.

We will start by removing the rear screws of the graphics card, in our case we have a backplate. The question is should we withdraw it or not, the truth is that it is not necessary in our case. Although there may be dust in there, the hassle is not necessary. We have withdrawn it but, we insist, it is not necessary.

The first thing we are going to do is to extract exclusively the screws that are supporting the case of the graphics card that has the fans. They differ from those that support the heatsink because they are the ones that would have to be removed to remove the backplate, while in the case of the screws corresponding to the heatsink they have nothing to do with the backplate. On other graphics cards, it would all come together.

Once those screws are removed, we carefully extract the case with the fans, remembering to disconnect its connector before anything else.

Once this is done, we find ourselves with a dilemma that we will have to solve. It is a question of whether or not it is worth continuing to disassemble the graph. We explain ourselves: To remove the dust from the heatsinks it is not necessary to remove them, it can be done without taking them outside. The fact of removing them will make cleaning more comfortable but if we remove it it would be mainly to be able to replace the thermal paste of our graphics card. Then it’s time for you to consider whether to replace it or not, something you probably shouldn’t do if the graph isn’t very old.

Well, if you are going to clean only the heatsink, everything is correct. There are several methods to clean the dust: the use of compressed air ( remember to use it in the correct orientation without spilling liquid, and immobilize the fans while we remove the dust ), a brush, or a vacuum cleaner … For heatsinks like this, it would probably come with a brush, although canisters of compressed air are cheap and can be used to clean the entire PC, or maybe you already have a compressor at home.