Dust can literally choke your PC, and a level-headed enthusiast will regularly check and clean dust filters, fans, and other parts of their systems. Though it might seem inexcusable to let dust pile up in a PC, it seems to be a pretty common occurrence. This weekend, Germany’sPCGH.dehighlighted some of the worst “fluffy balls of horror” (machine translation) that have been shared by its readers. If you enjoy a scare, its ~400 picture gallery might shiver your timbers.
The images over at PCGH.de come with a disclaimer of sorts. “Please note: Many of the extremely dirty computers do not belong to community members, but were simply handed over to them for troubleshooting, upgrades, or cleaning, and photographed at the time,” pleads the magazine on its readers’ behalf.
As well as the horror of seeing these images, there is some dusty nostalgia to be had, as the PCGH.de user forum thread has been growing since back in 2012, when a guest poster first showed off a be quiet! CPU cooler caked with dust.
There’s a lot of old PC coolers, motherboard, graphics cards and more which you might recognize from back in the day – despite their cloaking in dust. See thisold Gainward graphics card, for example, or thisAsus Maximum III Formula-based system that was owned by a heavy smoker, and here’s a dust-caked AbitFatality FP-IN9 SLIsystem, too.
Laptops, hurricanes, and maintenance
In this writer’s experience, laptops are even more prone to and more badly affected by dust ingress - due to users often placing them on soft furnishings and the relatively tiny cooling systems they use. However, they don’t feature heavily in this PCGH.de gallery.
Last year we reported on a similarly grotty looking PC system from North Carolina. However, we couldn’t blame the owner for lax housekeeping, as their Fractal Design Define C housed system wasdevastatedby the terrible Hurricane Helene. That system was too far gone for even a capable electric duster like the Wolfbox MF100, currently40% off at Amazon, to make a meaningful impact.
Last, but not least, it would be fun for our readers to share some of their ‘fluffy balls of horror’ (remember, we are talking PCs) alongside this post. Feel free to upload your latest dusty horror images here.
Get Tom’s Hardware’s best news and in-depth reviews, straight to your inbox.
Mark Tyson is a news editor at Tom’s Hardware. He enjoys covering the full breadth of PC tech; from business and semiconductor design to products approaching the edge of reason.
