"Beware of false knowledge. It is more dangerous than ignorance." - George Bernard Shaw
The computer that I built a couple of years ago had been moaning and groaning for a few months. It was doing this whenever I woke it up from "asleep" mode. One of the fans had a failing bearing, and I finally got annoyed enough to take the computer apart and figure out which of them it was. There were several fans to inspect. The power supply has a fan, there are 3 on the case, one for the CPU, and one on the motherboard.
The fan that was crapping out was the fan on the motherboard, underneath the slotted sheet metal at the bottom right.
This particular motherboard has a SouthBridge chipset that uses 15 watts of power and tends to run pretty hot. As a result, it requires its own cooling fan. I would imagine a large finned heat sink would work better than a cheap fan, but it is what they made. Had I realized the amount of noise this fan makes, I'd have selected a different board, but here we are. It makes even more noise when the bearing is failing.
I placed an order for a replacement fan on Amazon, and as is typical these days with stuff that isn't useless, it took a long time to arrive. With the new fan in hand, I pulled the computer apart yet again. Of course the fan was not only buried under the sheet metal, it was also buried under the graphics card :)
Below: The offending, howling, dinky little fan.
And of course the replacement fan was not an exact fit. The mounting brackets don't match and it's not a three-wire (variable speed) fan. Figures, LOL.
Improvise. Adapt. Overcome. I got some foam tape that is sticky on both sides and stuck the new fan in place with that. I plugged it in and tested that it had power. The old cover would no longer go back on, because the new fan has a higher profile than the old one.
It isn't as pretty as it was, but it still works and doesn't seem to be glitching due to overheating.
UPDATE 8 January 2023. The correct model fan finally arrived. I verified that I'd ordered the correct fan previously, and I had - that seller no longer exists on Amazon. Maybe they were just clearing out inventory by sending similar items toward the end of the business' life. I don't know.
In any event, this new fan is the correct model number. It's also a three wire variable speed fan, with the correct mounting points. I had to pull off the "Made in China" sticker to verify the model. Now I just need an opportunity to exchange the incorrect fan and replace the missing metal shroud.
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