Was just cleaning out my console and got me thinking about how the dust that gathers actually affects performance as it gathers on the outside of the device.
In: Technology
Dust clogs air intakes and vents and makes fans less effcient. your console is using these fans and airways to keep cool, if they are less effcient, the console has to decrease power to the processors to make less heat.
But that power was what was making the processor run fast too, so it slows down.
It affects performance indirectly as it makes cooling a lot more inefficient. Cooling is important because computer components are designed to work at a certain temperature range, and could be damaged at very high temperatures. Heat is produced more by components working harder. So computers are designed so that if they reach a too-high temperature and can’t cool down using their fans, they’ll instead start slowing down vital components like the processor or graphics card to prevent temperatures from getting too high
Semiconductors generate heat when they’re being used, and die if they get too hot. Modern processors have temperature sensors and will decrease clock speed and voltage if they get hot, to keep themselves from dying.
Dust makes it harder to keep those parts cool, making them more likely to thermally throttle. The thermal throttling is what you notice as a performance degradation.
It’s the dust INSIDE the device that matters, unless the outer case is used as a heatsink.
Dust clogs air intakes that are meant to let heat escape. A lot of electronics will throttle back performance depending on how hot a CPU or processor is getting, or shut it off if it gets too hot.
It’s giving your processors a sweater, could you run fast for a long time if you were wearing a sweater 24/7?
The dust on the outside doesn’t do too much. But if it accumulates, chances are that it’s also getting inside of the device. Consoles rely on fans to move air through the device to cool it. Inside the device it can impede airflow and prevent internal components from cooling off by covering passively cooled components (like the RAM) or clogging heatsinks and fans for the actively cooled components.
If the device detects that its components are getting too hot, it will slow them down to prevent them from overheating and causing permanent damage.
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