The way my machine is built, the video card is towards the bottom of the case and upside down --with the video card fan casing hanging downwards. So it is just slightly difficult to see. When I clean out my machine I have mainly concentrated on the CPU heatsink while the fan side of the vid card always appeared quite clean, although because of it's placement a bit difficult to see. A bit of dust collects on the underside of the card - which faces upwards - and is easily cleaned. Because I have been having some trouble, I decided to take the vid card out - had a look at the fan, it had a little bit of dust on the leading edges of the fan blades, but otherwise looked OKTHEN - I squinted my eyes and looked right into the fan (sideways) - you can't see much in there but what I saw was a thick layer of dust and hair ( a bit like a piece of felt) - so I got an aircompressor with a needle attachment that is normally used to pump footbals up. Carefully placed it through the gap in the fan blades - and half of the Gobi Desert was blown out!!!Pulled the needle out and placed it into the other side of the heatsink, and the other half of the Gobi was blown out the other side.These video card fans (and especially the housing) are clamped down over the heatsink - the heatsink itself has fins that are very finely spaced ie - not much space between fins. A natural dust trap - that you cant even see without looking hard!!Now to see if my strange graphics problems (bad artifacts) have gone away. I have not had any other trouble except for FSx throwing some graphics wobbles are a while of flyingBarry

Awesome, tell us if it has a large effect. If it does I'm expecting that every flight simulator will have a clean room in his basement.

Yeah- I was just able to complete a mission that I couldn't complete before, because the graphics would go bad in the middle of it!!I have been using this vid card with FS9 up until just the last few days - it appears that FSx does put a larger load on the card and, being dirty, it just couldn't take it.Barry