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Hello! SO I'm curious as to whether removing the RAM from it's socket (with the computer off obviously) and cleaning it and its socket would improve PC performance since my PC was rather dusty and I'm wondering if some dust got in and might be affecting performance. ― Blaze The WolfTalkBlaze Wolf#6545 15:23, 29 November 2021 (UTC)
I have some experience with home built computers and so also I have some knowledge of both AMD and Intel CPUs, and also both AMD and Nvidia discrete GPUs. With a recentish CPU and GPU, it's fairly unsurprising that cleaning out the heatsink may improve performance. Boost clocks depend on various limits imposed by the manufacturer sometimes partially adjustable in your EFI settings (for CPUs), but generally temperature is one of them. BTW by recentish I mean ~10 years. Prior to that CPUs did tend to have thermal throttling so you could still see an effect but arguably a well made desktop especially one that isn't aiming for extreme compactness should generally have been far from thermal throttling so it's something you'd have been less likely to see. I'd say both Intel and AMD have gotten more aggressive in their boost offerings so in some ways it's even more likely with more recent systems e.g. 5 years.
In fact the recently launched Alder Lake CPUs at least of the K variety are known for being particularly aggressive removing a default time limit (tau) for the boost clocks. Meaning that even with stock settings the 12900K may operate with the Maximum Turbo Power of "241W" continously. Unsurprisingly many cooling solutions cannot handle this and I think many feel it's not unreasonable to design your system without intending to. So even without dust your performance may be limited by your cooling system. Although I'd note that this is something only likely to affect extreme benchmarks capable of significantly using most or all the cores of the system e.g. the in/famous Cinebench. It's something that won't affect gaming much at all unless your cooling system is woefully undersized so it can barely or maybe can't even handle the Processor Base Power of "125W". However since this is something that isn't that hard to benchmark, you can tests showing it (via differing cooling systems or cases) both on Alder Lake and other CPUs.
Getting back to the question, while too much dust can negatively affect performance I wouldn't assume it's the case here. While I'd definitely encourage cleaning out dust, the fact that the system is fairly silent now but needed to ramp up a bit before doesn't really tell us whether performance suffered before. If it's silent now this would suggest to me the cooling isn't being particularly taxed. So while it's good to clean out the dusk there's a fair chance it was still working well enough before even if it was noiser. Especially if this is a moderately sized desktop not a notebook. Considering the placebo effect in this case not only from the act of cleaning but from the lower noise, "it seems faster" is no susbtitute to benchmarks. (Even reliably benchmarking something can be difficult.)
As for the RAM issue, I'd say the chance it can affect performance especially if the system doesn't have ECC and most do not, is so low it's simply not worth considering. I'd also note that while dust can get into surprisingly places, the chance it will get into the RAM socket when the RAM is already seated is very slim. So in fact removing the RAM if you haven't sufficiently cleaned the system of dust is probably a bigger risk.
Note that I'm explictly not saying dirt or dust on the RAM stick or socket isn't a problem. It can be but the effect will generally be crashes or other errors or even the system not POSTing. It won't be lower performance. Actually reseating components is a fairly standard part of troubleshooting. This is more likely just poor contact for some other reason, however cleaning the contacts and socket would be another step especially if you're fairly sure the problem is the RAM (e.g. memtest errors). Although in terms of dirt I'd note again this is something far more likely to happen during assembly or re-assembly that something than over time. (However if the dust or dirt was already there, it may move around over time especially with handling so could become a problem when it wasn't before.)