Spent $150 on a thermal imaging camera for diagnosing overheating PCs

I picked up a cheap thermal cam off Amazon a few months back to find hot spots in desktop builds. Last week it saved me hours on a customer's rig that kept crashing. Turns out the VRM heatsink was completely loose and hitting 95C under load. Has anyone else found a good use for one of these things beyond just looking at cool pictures?

3 comments

3 Comments

aaronsullivan1d ago

Picked one up for the same reason and it paid for itself on the first job. Found a bad capacitor on a motherboard that looked fine visually but was running way hotter than everything else around it. Also use it to check laptop fan ducts for clogs since the dust pack shows up as a cold spot compared to the hot air trying to get through. Just watch the cheap ones can be off by a few degrees but they're still good enough for finding problem areas.

robert6591d ago

Lol yeah the "just watch the cheap ones" part hit close to home. Mine was so far off I thought my fridge had a fever until I realized it was the tool, not the appliance. Still found a failing PSU fan with it though so guess it paid for itself in embarrassment alone.

price.ray21h ago

The cheap ones measure in "close enough" and "maybe.