Photo credit: Thejus Parol
One thing you don’t expect to find in any gaming PC is live fire ants, but that is exactly what Thejus Parol discovered after opening up the case on his.These critters were apparently devouring the thermal paste and thermal pads around the Zotac GTX 1060 GPU inside his PC.
My CPU/GPU got infested by ants when I was gone for a month. I played games and ran benchmarks so they would come out cos of heat. Also left my pc running overnight but they still inside. Help
byu/lazylollipop inpcmasterrace
Thankfully, the fire ants did not cause any permanent damage to the PC, but he may have to replace the thermal paste and thermal pads on GPU to avoid degraded thermal performance. Fire ants are reportedly attracted to electric fields, which would make climbing into a PC seem somewhat understandable, especially with all of the heat it generates. In the end, Parol used IPA (ethyl alcohol) to clean everything up before applying fresh thermal paste to get things back up and running normally.
- System: Intel Core i7-13700F 2.1GHz 8+8 Cores | Intel B760 Chipset | 16GB DDR5 | 1TB PCIe Gen4 NVMe SSD | Genuine Windows 11 Home 64-bit
- Graphics: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4060 Ti 16GB Video Card | 1x HDMI | 2x DisplayPort
- Connectivity: 6 x USB 3.1 | 2 x USB 2.0 | 1x RJ-45 Network Ethernet 10/100/1000 | 802.11AC Wi-Fi | Audio: 7.1 Channel | Keyboard and mouse
Ants are native to our region, it’s almost impossible to get rid of the very last ant in here , they were pretty common in our households too , but it’s the first time they started attacking electronics , it looks like it’s time to do a massive ant massacre here!,” said Thejus.
[Source]
