After almost a year of not playing any games on my desktop PC, I decided to resume gaming. But I don't have the urge to play games as I used to. Probably it is because my PC is getting old. Well, it is only about two years old and it is working perfectly well.
Or probably because the Internet in my apartment is pathetic.
Or maybe both.
One thing I noticed, which I had noticed when I was playing games before as well, is that the PC run pretty hot in the small shoebox sized case. There is nothing much I can do about it though. I want to keep my overclocks, which is conservative because I care about the power consumption, but they are not helping the situation either way. Funnily though, the video card, which is the biggest power eater inside the case, never hits 80C. The CPU, on the other hand, loves to hit 85C while using Handbrake.
I don't think the video card is causing the CPU to run hot because the fans of the video card do not spin when I'm not gaming; which means there is no way that it dumping hot air into the case has anything to do with it. Besides, the CPU cooler is my 6 years old Antec Kuhler 620, which is mounted at the front of the case pulling cool air in from the outside of the case. So I don't think the GPU would affect the CPU temps at all.
Too bad I cannot test it. The display I am using needs a Dual-Link DVI port and my CPU's integrated GPU cannot drive it.
But I wonder if the effectiveness of the coolant inside the water cooler has noticeably deteriorated over time. I didn't even use the cooler for about 3 years and I switched to this when migrated my PC to my current case in 2015. In that span, I had 3 coolers which I used for more than a month.
Now that I have settled down in Australia, I was thinking of upsizing my PC back to ATX size, to give me more cooling and expansions capabilities. But that would be an expensive upgrade.