If you take care of your PC, you might avoid a dust problem as bad as this. If you don’t, all sorts of bad things might happen - chiefly, your graphics card could overheat.
Like us, you've probably been scraping and blowing and wiping dust off air intakes and fans for years, or if you're really fastidious - using one of the many cleaning toolkits available.
Now MSI has a graphics card with "dust removal" listed as a feature, alongside things like CUDA cores and HDMI outputs. As the MSI web site explains it, the fan on the N580GTX Lightning Xtreme Edition, "will rotate in the opposite direction for 30 seconds. By running in reverse, the fan helps to remove dust from the heatsink fins to ensure optimal cooling every time."
Like it says on the tin: removes dust. Where it goes after that, we're not sure.
Obviously, there's more factors involved in the temperature inside your PC case than the graphics card fan. MSI has also given the fan on the N580GTX a special coating that changes from blue to white if temperatures reach 45 degrees.
Given that this is being billed as the "most powerful graphic card on the planet", it's no surprise MSI's marketing is featuring cooling features heavily. Still, considering the gunk we find clogging our friend's and family's PCs, we'd suggest a little of the same thinking could be applied to mainstream desktop PC parts.
Feel free to share your dusty PC horror stories below.
