RTX 4090 servicing photos confirm that you shouldn't smoke near your PC

Smoking near your PC can turn even a top-tier graphics card into something resembling an archaeological find.

Knowing that in theory is one thing. Actually seeing a GeForce RTX 4090 heatsink caked in an even layer of yellow-brown gunk that barely counts as dust anymore is something else entirely.

The photo of this cooler spread across Reddit and made everyone cringe in unison.

Judging by the description, the card owner ran into an extreme case of what happens to electronics in a heavy smoker's home. After a two-hour cleaning session, they reported: "Just to let everyone know, after a 2 hour clean, and previous hotspot values of 105c, I can happily say the card is alive, and is not going over 80c base value, absolutely insane recovery"

The card even got a full thermal pad swap, and the fact it booted up at all afterward counts as a small miracle on its own. As the owner noted: "It's had a full thermal padding replacement, it's a miracle it still works"

The mechanism behind this transformation is simple, which is exactly what makes it unpleasant. Tobacco smoke carries tar that settles on everything and works like glue.

Dust that floats around in the air regardless of smoking sticks to that tacky film and compresses into the same yellow crust. Beautiful-Musk-Ox, who worked at a computer store, explained it this way: "the tar mixes with the dust that's always in the air. this computer would be caked with dust even if they didn't smoke (seen it dozens of times when working at a computer store), but for smokers the tar and dust mix and turn into this"

A good comparison came up regarding human lungs. Unlike a heatsink, people have cilia, tiny hairs that clear contaminants out of the airways.

Tar from smoking glues those hairs down and stops them from doing their job. As bs2k2_point_0 put it: "Difference is your lungs have tiny hairs called cilia that clean out your lungs of contaminants (to a degree). Your pc doesn't. So it just builds up on your electronics much faster." So the heatsink just ends up being more honest about what's accumulating inside the smoker, minus the ability to cough it up.

Not everyone who smokes near their PC recognized their own setup in the photo, though.

Plenty of people commented that they've smoked next to their PC for years with their cards barely darkening, let alone forming a crust like that. One user summed up the likely explanation: "There has to be other environmental environmental factors going in here besides smoking. I smoke, and I know a million percent it's bad. Everything about smoking is bad and I'd never recommend it. I've never seen any of the computers I've had over the years get anything like this. Granted I clean my PC's regularly, and have a couple front dust filters for my case I swap out every week, and I have a dog/cats. Mayb