Small update on my little junk tower project: Almost ruined the graphics card

So I decided the graphics card needed some cleaning, as one should after more than ten years of zero proper cleaning (Please, for the love of god, blow the dust out of your computers and game consoles every once in a while, compressed air in a can isn't that expensive)

Well, first step was to take off the heat sink. I knew there was a lot of dust, and I needed access to all of it.

Thermal paste has a bit of a funny property. It starts of very gooey, just smushes right in there between the chip you're cooling and the heatsink. Well, as it ages, it goes from a heat transferring goo to a heat proof superglue.

It will lose its ability to efficiently transfer heat from the heat to the heatsink, and it will feel like it fused the chip and hunk of metal together.

I was aware of this possibility, but my itty bitty worm brain did not slow down to think "Hey, maybe I should heat this up a bit or get some rubbing alcohol in there to soften it up," instead deciding to pry between the board and the heatsink while twisting it to hopefully get it off OK.

Surprisingly it worked, but it felt awful. It felt like I was about to rip the poor thing apart, and when it did come loose a horrible snapping sound was heard. Thankfully is was just the sound of the thermal paste finally giving up and letting go. It genuinely felt like I had ripped the chip off the board and ruined a mostly OK graphics card.

As expected, it was dusty as fuck. It looks like I attempted to clean it out with compressed air, but that was years ago, and I doubt it had any meaningful affect.

I'm gonna take a day and maybe sleep so I can do this in a not tired state, so maybe the actual cleaning process won't be done by someone with less motor control than an angry gorilla jacked on crack.