Make your PC quieter and cooler

The honest answer: it is in your model's data sheet, and the numbers differ noticeably between manufacturers and generations. What holds for all of them: modern cards protect themselves. If it gets too warm, they lower clock and voltage on their own.

So what matters in practice is not the point where something breaks, but the point where the card slows down. Below roughly 75 degrees the clock usually stays stable. From around 83 degrees many cards start throttling, and you notice that as an unsteady frame rate.

If your card throttles, that is not a defect. It is the protection doing its job. It is a sign, though, that the cooling is at its limit.

Shut down first, then pull the plug, then flip the power supply switch to 0. Wait a few seconds and press the power button once so the residual charge is gone.

Do not hold a household vacuum against the components. The airflow in the tube builds static charge, and that can damage electronics. A vacuum standing nearby, picking up the dust you blow out, is fine.

Use canned compressed air, keep the can upright and spray in short bursts. Tilted, cold propellant comes out as liquid, and that is not a good idea on a circuit board.

Hold every fan still before you blow at it. A fan driven by compressed air spins far beyond its intended speed and acts as a small generator while doing so. The voltage flowing back into the controller can damage it. A finger or a toothpick between the blades is enough.

Do not forget the dust filters. Most cases have them at the front, bottom and top, and after a year they are often more clogged than anything else in the machine. Most pull out and can be rinsed under running water. Let them dry completely before they go back in.

Best done outdoors or on a balcony. Nobody wants the dust from a two year old machine spread around the living room.

Cap the frame rate. By far the biggest lever and it costs nothing. The calculator at the top of this page tells you what value.

Then dust, then the dust filters, then where the machine stands.

Only after that is it worth touching the fan curve. Before that you are optimising around a problem that actually sits elsewhere.

Not in a closed cabinet compartment. A machine in a compartment without an opening at the back breathes its own exhaust, and then the temperature rises on its own until nothing works.

Not right next to the heating and not in direct sunlight. The graphics card can only get as cool as the air it draws in, plus whatever the cooler cannot carry away.

Not standing on deep pile carpet. Most power supplies draw from below, and carpet closes half that intake. A board underneath is enough.

A few centimetres of space at the back and sides. Where the warm air comes out it also has to be able to leave.

Front and bottom draw air in, back and top blow it out. Warm air rises, and the direction simply follows that path.

Every fan has two small arrows moulded into the frame: one for airflow, one for rotation. If you are unsure, hold a sheet of paper in front of it.

One more fan on the intake side often does more than two expensive ones on the exhaust. A case that extracts more than it takes in pulls air through every gap, and plenty of dust with it.

Short term yes, permanently it is not a good idea. Without the side panel the directed airflow is gone, individual components get less air than before, and dust lands in the machine unfiltered.

If it gets noticeably cooler with the case open, that is a finding: the airflow is wrong. Then fans or filters are the actual topic.

If you are unsure, do not. Replacing thermal paste helps noticeably on older machines, but getting there means removing the cooler on the processor and completely dismantling the card on the graphics side.

On the processor it is manageable and doable for someone taking their time. On the graphics card it is not: there are thermal pads of various thicknesses as well, and the wrong thickness on reassembly is worse than the old paste.

A note on warranty: in the EU you do not lose your statutory rights against the seller by opening a device. A voluntary manufacturer's warranty is a different thing and can have its own conditions. If there is a seal on the card, read your manufacturer's warranty terms first.

And the honest advice: do everything else on this page first. In most cases there is no need left afterwards.

In this order: dust, dust filters, room temperature, a game or program demanding more than before.

If it happened from one day to the next and none of that applies, check whether something is running in the background that was not there before. The live monitoring in the Windows application shows you which part of the machine is working.

A fan that grinds or rattles instead of rushing is a different case. That is a bearing at its end, and no curve helps against that.