The red fire ant originally comes from South America, but was introduced to the USA and sometimes causes massive problems there. Interestingly, the fire ant appears to be attracted to electrical fields like those found in gaming PCs. Studies have shown that the ants collect in active electrical fields and disperse again when they are switched off. But the little insects seem to feel permanently at home in gaming PCs in particular, as individual posts on Reddit show.
Fortunately, in our latitudes we do not yet have to contend with an insect plague like the fire ant. However, in the United States, small colonies of ants sometimes appear to populate the gaming computers of PC hobbyists. Reddit user Thejus_Parol shows photos of his Nvidia Geforce GTX 1060 from Zotac in which the fire ants not only crawl out of the graphics card: After removing the graphics card cooler, it becomes apparent that the insects have also “eaten” through the thermal pads and the thermal paste .
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In a video on Reddit, another PC hobbyist presents his PC equipped with an NZXT AiO water cooling system and a Sapphire Nitro+ graphics card, from which ants crawl out while playing. Apparently the animals were sitting under the heat sinks of the CPU and graphics card and were startled by the waste heat from the PC components. “My CPU/GPU was infested with ants when I was away for a month. I was playing games and running benchmarks so they would come out because of the heat. I also left my PC running overnight but they were still in” , writes the affected Reddit user lazylollipop on the Reddit video in question.
“Don’t use your PC when the ants are in there. They could cause a short circuit and ruin everything,” warns another Reddit user in a comment on the video.
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Quelle: Reddit (1, 2) via PCGamesN, JSTOR