Losing Fans
Oops. Deb’s computer just had a CPU overheating incident, which followed close on the heels an abrupt increase in fan noise. Yay for alarms!
We shut it down and opened the thing up. I have a can of compressed air, so I sprayed out the “where did so much of that come from” dust and checked things. Sounded like it had to be the power supply or CPU fan making the noise. I ruled out the back case fan by starting it with that unplugged, and I could hear it wasn’t the front case fan. The easiest next thing to rule out was the CPU fan, by unplugging it and starting the boot process long enough to hear the difference.
Sure enough, things quieted dramatically. As expected, since a fan problem and CPU overheating would seem a logical confluence. So I hooked it back up, cleaned the fan and cooling fins extremely thoroughly, fired it up and monitored the temperature some more. It dropped to 100 or so, which is fine for the particular computer.
We’re in a mode of leaving the side of the case off to help it cool (frankly, I think the chimney the case uses doesn’t help and may actually let things get warmer than if it didn’t have one), shutting it down when not in use (normally we always leave them on unless we both leave the house for any length of time), and being cognizant of the possibility of another overheating event. It’ll probably be fine, but we obviously need a new fan/cooling unit, if only to make it quieter, even though as far as I can tell the fan is spinning at a reasonable RPM and is again helping cool the CPU.
This is the second case of an Intel branded CPU fan on a Pentium 4 going loud (if not associated with overheating) in the past six weeks. The other one I replaced the cooling/fan unit with an allegedly superior one bought by the computer’s owned at CompUSA for $19.99. It was a fricken pain to mount, then it didn’t make adequate cooling contact and the machine overheated. I had to dismount it, apply silicon goop for good heat conductivity between the heat sink and CPU, and remount it. Instead of goop, these days they use square pads of material, which apparently wasn’t sufficient. First time I have ever seen that happen, but usually I’m dealing with Intel-branded ones that came with the retail boxed CPUs. I prefer getting those to OEM versions; better manufacturer warranty and saves hassle. But I digress.
Needless to say, I am not excited about buying the CompUSA version. At least not that one, which had metal clips, similar to those on a heat sink/fan for an AMD CPU. I have spent as much as half an hour struggling to get an AMD cooling unit to mount on the CPU. Ugh.
Looks like I can get a fan-only for the CPU from one of my parts suppliers, for just a few dollars. That would be nice. Of course, they’re 45 miles away and I don’t expect to need to go there for other parts for at least a week… So we’ll see. I’ll be thrilled not to have to replace the whole heat sink and fan together, if I can manage it. At least it’s not an expensive problem.
Sounds like what I went thru about a month ago. Everything got really loud and all I could think of was “Please, don’t die on me before I can get my Quicken information backed up!”. I opened the case and used canned air to clean it out. Everything is all better now.
I’ve been lucky and not had to replace any of the fans though!
Posted by Bogie on 02/06 at 09:02 AMI’m now using a CPU fan that is simply huge, sticks out from the CPU about 4-5 inches and is about 5 inches wide. The nice thing about it is that it is Quiet since the fan used is a 3 inch fan and thus spins slower for same cooling power.
Posted by on 02/07 at 02:42 PM
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