On 20/10/10 18:49, Rob Malpass wrote:
>
> Hi all
>
>
>
> Can anyone help with solving the following "phenomenon"? At boot, my
> main machine developed a low tone groaning noise - the sort that
> signals the fan is gunked up. After being on for about a minute -
> the noise goes away. I brushed it clean on Monday. On reboot -
> silence - all seemed well.
>
>
>
> Now curiously the groaning noise is back! However rather curiously
> the noise doesn't start a couple of seconds after boot as it did
> before - it now happens about 15-20 seconds after boot - then it goes
> silent again after about a minute.
>
>
>
> So I'm pretty sure the graphics card fan is the culprit (running the
> machine with no graphics card it was silent from power up to power
> down), but it was brushed clean so it can't have gunked up again in 2
> days - or can it? And if it has (there are no holes in the case - no
> open card slots etc) I'm not too sure how I could prevent it gunking
> up again.
>
>
>
> Anyone experienced this? Any known workarounds?
>
>
>
> All I can think of is the noise is present when the fan rotation speed
> is low - but when it speeds up (after it's been on for a minute or so
> and the card is warmer) - the noise goes away.
>
Sounds plausible. What I believe tends to happen is that the dust is
distributed unevenly across the blades causing the fan to wobble on its
axis, generating noise and causing wear.
> If this is the case - then is it anything to worry about at all? My
> main concern was that if left unattended the card could overheat and
> that could lead to problems elsewhere.
>
Well, I doubt it would mean problems for anything other than the GPU,
unless of course your case cooling is so minimal that it would raise the
temperature in there to the point where something else overheated, but
that seems pretty unlikely to me.
What sort of graphics card do you have? Some better cards (usually
nvidia and ati with based chipsets) will accept 3rd party quiet cooling
solutions.
Sean
--
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