Advertise with Googlier.comHJ Blog > Dust-Up Over Video Card I shut down the machine and popped out the video card and wow was there a lot of dust on the grill that cools off the GPU.
I first had to use a thin piece of plastic to nudge all the dust along the grill and bunch it up a bit, then used tweezers to get most of it off, which got about 70% of it. Then I dragged in the vacuum to really suck the rest out, and I topped it off by blowing some compressed air over it. Everything short of hiring a french maid to come in with the feather duster. I also took a touch of time out to dust the inside of the MacPro too.
Hooked everything back up and now I have a much quieter Mac. Not whisper-quiet, like it was when it was new, but I think the current noise level is probably due to the 3 internal drives, and no longer because of accumulated dust on my video card.
Here's the sequence of photos here to give some better idea of how much dust I'm talking about. If you didn't know to look for dust, you might have assumed that grayish wall had some intentional purpose: