Sometimes when I turn my PC on, I’m greeted by a warning on screen that one of my fans is spinning too slowly. I found out the fan on the northbridge wasn’t spinning at all. Often, I’d just power off and back on, and it would kick the fan into running. I realised this obviously isn’t a good idea, longterm, so I’d better sort it.
I dug around online to find a suitable replacement. Coolermaster and Akasa do a few, but both seem totally obsessed with putting blue LEDs into their fans. Whilst I normally have nothing against blue LEDs, I see no point having them inside a closed PC.
Zalman have a few heatsink-only kits; passively cooled, they won’t dissipate the heat as well, but will be silent. Whilst I’m all for silent or quieter PCs, I wouldn’t want it at the expense of stability and performance. The northbridge is an important component of any PC, so it needs to be running as well as it can.
I had a toddle down to PC World today and found that they do a replacement kit, but alas, it won’t fit. The mountings don’t align with the holes in the motherboard. It does come with some thermal sticky pads, but I don’t like the idea of them because they don’t transfer heat so well, and you run the risk of the pad getting hot and falling off. I’d end up even worse off in that situation!
I ended up dismantling the current fan, which required removing most of the innards of my PC. Once-upon-a-time I would have revelled in doing such things, but now I know that it can result in mistakes and damage being made, no matter how careful you are. I don’t fancy messing up my PC, so I proceeded with caution. I cleaned up the fan, and gave it a squirt of WD40. The fan seems to run a little better, but it’ll be interesting to see how long it can go before it packs up again. If it does, I’ll just RMA the motherboard, but if Dabs won’t do an advance replacement, that means no PC until it comes back. I have my Mac Mini though, so all is not lost! I’d be stuck with a single monitor which would probably be the hardest thing now, seeing as how used to it I am.
Here’s hoping it can behave!