Not so long ago, my rig briefly caught ablaze. Considering it’s one of the best gaming PCs you can buy today, I almost collapsed right there on the spot when I started to see flames flickering from the bottom right corner of my home-built desktop. It’s one of the most alarming tech malfunctions I’ve witnessed in the two decades I’ve been building PCs.
I’m not actually blaming Kay Vess or her ludicrously cuddly sidekick Nix for this fiery fiasco, but the game that seemingly started to make my PC burn was Star Wars Outlaws. It’s a decent enough action-adventure romp, sure. Yet if that was the title that had melted my desktop into a Wicked Witch-style pool of sadness, every bit of Star Wars memorabilia I own was going straight in the bin.
What actually caused the fire was a very old drive I’d been keeping in my PC that I hadn’t stored anything on in years. It had absolutely no business still being inside my rig, but I’ll get to that.
In the meantime, let me run you through some tips so you can keep your PC as cool and safe as possible, hopefully allowing you to avoid the fiery fate that almost ruined my rig.
Cooling is key
One of the most important aspects of keeping your gaming PC cool, which will in turn make it run more stably and be less prone to crashes, is by investing in a good CPU cooler. While traditional fan coolers are decent enough and will keep your processor temps down, you really want to opt for a liquid cooling solution.
Not only do most liquid coolers look badass, they’ll keep your CPU significantly more chill than their fan counterparts. This gives you more headroom to overclock your processor safely, and should also make your system more stable. After all, a cool CPU — the joint most important component installed on your motherboard alongside the GPU — is a happy CPU.
Traditionally I’ve always found Corsair air coolers to be the most reliable, and if you’re into your RGB, many of the company’s models will light up your life. Corsair’s excellent iCUE software also allows you to customize the RGB of your cooler, and any other Corsair components you have installed. If you own a Corsair PC case, you can also tweak the levels of fan speed and noise, giving you further control over the temperature of your rig.
Good air circulation
First off, apologies for those stickers you can see in the shot above. I’m not usually that kind of brand-promoting dweeb, honest. And yes, I’m aware they look a bit tacky. I was forced to stick them on my white case because they now obscure the burn marks from my fiery moment that no amount of wet wipes would fully clean up.
Aside from buying a good cooler, your next priority should be picking up a case that provides top notch air circulation. If you own a sizable high-end graphics card like the Nvidia GeForce RTX 4090 (or by some bot-beating miracle, the new RTX 5090), you’ll want a large and in charge Full Tower case to give your motherboard and all of its installed parts plenty of room to breathe.
If you’re working with a smaller GPU, you can probably get away with a Mid Tower case. Either way, you ideally want a case that has at least four system fans — three on the front and one in the rear. If you’ve heeded my previous advice and taken the plunge on a quality air cooler that should also come with a couple of additional fans, too.
Master cable management
You know what grinds my gears to an unreasonable degree? Bad cable management. If you have a see-through PC case with a glass panel that lets you ogle your GPU, CPU and (no doubt) RGB-lit RAM, what’s the point in admiring all of that expensive kit if you have SATA cables and other wires snaking around these components? Cables that are most likely hideously tangled, too.
The best PC cases normally have glass panels to allow you to admire your rig’s components. And why not? If you’ve just sunk north of a grand into a lightning fast GPU, you should be able to coo over it whenever you want. Yet if you don’t tidy your cables, your rig is going to end up being an utter eyesore.
Granted, I’m overly obsessed with keeping my wires as out of sight and untangled as possible. There’s no question though, that good cable management doesn’t just make your PC more aesthetically pleasing, it can also help with air flow. Controlling your cables should also ensure you won’t accidentally pull out your CPU fan header the next time you go to fiddle with your RAM slots because you’ve got a stack of unorganized cables weaving their way around your motherboard.
Cables ties are an incredibly cheap and effective way of fastening your wires together to keep them neat and tidy. Visit Amazon or Best Buy and you’ll be able to pick up dozens of them for a couple of bucks/pounds.
Skipping back to PC cases, many high-end ones rock a dual chamber design, meaning they have a rear panel that allows you to hide all of the cables connected to your PSU. Not only do these compartments conceal those unsightly wires, they give your motherboard and its most vital components more space to maximize air ventilation; especially if your PC case is rocking a respectable number of fans.
Just make sure you also use ties for the cables housed in these rear compartments, even if your wires are out of sight. The one big error I made that I’m pretty sure led to my rig briefly bursting into flames happened because I just jammed all of my PSU cables into a criss-crossing abomination behind my case’s rear panel, then didn’t sweat over it simply because I couldn’t see them.
Clean your PC regularly
I’m not saying you have to wipe down your rig until your knuckles bleed or invest in an expensive compressed PC air duster — yes, those are actual things. What I am suggesting is that you regularly clean your rig just like any other piece of electronic equipment in your home that you value.
An example? If you own one of the best TVs, which may well be hooked up to your gaming PC, invest in some microfibre cloths and dust down your beloved display a couple of times a week.
When it comes to responsible desktop maintenance, dust is the enemy. Forget the clouds of ash that forced humanity to flee Earth in Christopher Nolan’s sci-fi masterpiece Interstellar. A dusty PC is just as distressing for fans of the best Steam games, should you let dirt and grime build up inside your rig.
Deploying a blast of compressed air is a great way to quickly eradicate any dust that’s collecting inside your PC’s case. But don’t feel you need to break the bank on an expensive air duster. Instead, cleaning your motherboard, GPU and case fans with a simple cloth should keep your PC as gunk-free as possible — in turn reducing the chances of any key components going on the fritz because you’ve neglected to clean them for months on end.
Don’t keep ridiculously old hard drives in your rig
I’ll admit this is an incredibly specific usage case scenario, and one you’re unlikely to run into. Still, the tale needs to be told because it's likely behind the big reveal of what caused my PC’s flirtation with flames. Why exactly did my gaming desktop almost barbecue itself as a result of those mini blazes breaking out? For some idiotic reason, not only had I installed several old SSDs I don’t use behind the rear panel of my Corsair case. Worse, there was a decade-old hard-drive in there that I most likely hadn’t interacted with for years.
As soon as I opened up the rear of my case once I’d swiftly blown out the mercifully small flames, I discovered this ancient HDD was leaking some sort of fluid. These dangerous juices had clearly been seeping from my redundant hard-drive for quite some time.
I can only assume said fluid played a major part in my PC pretending it was a supporting character in 1991’s fire fighter action thriller Backdraft, because that’s exactly where both bursts of flame started within the space of 15 minutes. Clearly, this was a risky component to be housing inside my rig and one that I should have thrown away a long time ago.
The point being is, if you’re keeping old drives inside your PC due to either laziness or sentimentality… well, don’t. The only storage I’ve actively used on my gaming rig in the last few years have exclusively been NVMe drives, which are much less likely to cause your system a problem as many come with heatsinks to regulate their temperature.
To conclude: fire is bad. Don’t let it get anywhere near your precious PC due to negligence.
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