I took Eileen-II apart partially to clean out the fans. It's been nearly a year since I unboxed Eileen-II, and given the really open [hot and humid] nature of where I operate Eileen-II, I would say that it is a little long overdue.
A basic cleaning of the fans is straightforward enough. Remove the relevant screws on the backplate, pop out the backplate, and go to town (gently) on the dust that has been collecting on the fins of the two puny high-efficiency fans. It gets a little tricky because these high-efficiency fans have very small fins, and they are tightly packed as well. I would normally use a can of compressed air to blow them out, but that is out of the question for today. So it's just careful cleaning as much as I can with cotton-buds soaked in 70% isopropyl alcohol, removing as much of the dust on the inlet side of the vents as I can.
Ideally the heat sink fins should also be de-dusted, since the dust there interferes with the heat exchange with the moving air. However, the heatsinks of laptops are usually quite embedded, making any form of more thorough cleaning a tricky and potentially warranty-voiding exercise.
With the cleaning, I'm hoping that the at-load temperatures wouldn't get too high. It doesn't mean that I will relax all the restrictions that I have put in place on CPU though. The hot temperatures are expected to persist till September, with maximum temperatures estimated to hit 35 °C on some days.
I just want to point out that is just 2 °C off the average human body's temperature. If high humidity is taken into account, the associated heat index may make it hard even for the human to cool down, let alone a machine.
This means that there may come a day some time in this upcoming months that I have to not run Eileen-II and do something else instead, if the cooling mechanisms cannot keep up.
Ah well. We'll deal with it when we need to deal with it.
Till the next update.
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