A friendly reminder to periodically clean your NUC

I have an Intel BOXNUC8i7BEH (specs) and I have been using it to run a VM and also as a host system/unit.

Lately, it's been having issues where even when I tried to run it without the chassis (i.e. running it in an "open case" configuration, the temps were still hitting a peak of 100 C whilst downloading something in the VM and also with 12 Firefox tabs open on the host itself.

So, given that it was still running so hot, even with it running out of the case/in the "open case" configuration, I figured that I would shut the unit down, wait for it to cool off a bit, and proceed with the further disassembling the unit.

Once I took the fan off, there was a LOT of dust that had been trapped where the inlet to the copper heatsink was, so I was able to clean that off with damp tissue paper.

And I also figured that since I had some Thermal Grizzly's Kyronaut sitting around, that I might as well also remove the plate that the heatpipes are connected to, clean off the old thermal paste that's on the CPU, and give it some new thermal paste whilst I'm at it.

Lo and below, the current system, still doing exactly what it was doing before (picking up from where it left off when I powered down the system) is now sitting at a cooler 85 C or so.

Yay!

Moral of the story: remember to periodically clean your NUC!