Well, this isn’t exactly news, but it’s worth to share this. This bugged me for a while and it caused some issues to me while I was debugging the game.

Yesterday, I decided to disassemble my laptop, to clean up the insides (as well as replacing the stock thermal compound (more about it here) with an aftermarket thermal paste). And wouldn’t you know, the fan was almost blocked on the exhaust side by a thick layer of dust. I had to disassemble almost the entire cooling system and the fan to see that layer. So, after cleaning, replacing the stock paste (I had to remove the system from the laptop’s motherboard just so I can disassemble it) and reassembled the laptop, big surprise, the laptop ran at max speed and ran cooler.

So, what does it mean?

Since before cleaning the fan, the laptop was slowly getting more dust over the years, resulting in increasing the temperature (since less heat was removed from the laptop) and at a certain point it would result in slowing down both the CPU and the integrated GPU to prevent damage in addition to making less comfortable and more annoying to work on the laptop. So, I can now work on my projects much better.

Moral of the story: Clean the cooling fans regularly (especially on laptops). Once a year is good enough.