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Pro tip: I picked a $4 USB fan over a $60 laptop cooler for a client's overheating tower, and the temps tell a funny story
A client brought in a tower last Tuesday that kept shutting down while she played games, and after I blew out about a pound of dust and watched the stock cooler struggle, I had to pick between quoting her a $60 laptop cooling pad setup she saw on some video, or zip tying a $4 USB desk fan I had sitting in my parts drawer right over the intake. I went with the cheap fan, mainly since her budget was already blown on a new power supply, and I figured I would just test it and swap later if it flopped. I used a little thermal paste on the CPU, set the fan to pull hot air out the back, and ran a stress test for 20 minutes while I ate a sandwich at my bench. Temps dropped from 94C to 71C, which is better than the pad would have done since those pads mostly cool the outside shell of a laptop, not the inside of a desktop. She picked it up Thursday, texted me a picture of her setup with the little fan taped to the case, and said it has not shut down once. Sometimes the dumb cheap fix beats the fancy one, but I still wonder if I should have upsold her on a proper case fan. Any of you ever gone with the hack job over the right part and had it actually hold up?
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sarah_hart20d ago
Big mistake, those pads are total junk anyway lol.
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