Computer gone quiet

projectmayhem

this isn't so much of a problem as a cautionary woe in the back of my mind. i was cleaning out the gunk on my heat-sync & fans in my system last week... to get at some of the dust i took the fan that's mounted on the cpu heat-sync off for a few minutes.. and screwed it back on after. since, my noisy computer has gone silent. upon further investigation, everything seems to be working. i didn't kill any fans or accidentally unplug anything from the mobo...

my only answer is that the fan was literally scewed into the wedges of the heat-sync (it came that way), so before i took it off and put it back, it wasn't screwed on properly, so was banging off the sync and creating loads of noise.

but just in case my theory is incorrect, is there anything i should check just to be sure?

note: i've had no performance drops, and when i put my hand to the side i still get the same waft of cool breeze... but you never know, so i may as well ask to be on the safe side

zerodown

Same issue when i was building a computer for a friend. The fan was very noisy as it was not fassened correctly and there was a piece of plastic clicking of it. If you cleaned the fan it will be alot quieter as over time when dirt or smoke builds up it tends to stick like glue and cause your computer to heat up more.

Use Motherboards Monitor or GigaByte Easy tune monitoring to keep and eye on the fans and there speed. Try playing a game for half hour and check the temps. If there all under say 50 full load your ok.

jor el

You should be able to read the temperatures and fan speeds in the BIOS, or with a program like Motherboard Monitor. If all looks well then no worries. The CPU fan shouldn't make any undue noise anyway, so if it was noisy before then it could have been loose.

sharingan

Getting cool air out the back isnt necessarily what you want.

Like everyone else has mentioned, install Motherboard Monitor
and find out what temp your chip is at properly.

This is probably very good advice in general before doing any fan maintenance:
check your chip temp with MBM before and after

Obviously test it after bootup, and then run some CPU stress tests,
to make sure that your ceiling temperature is good too.

projectmayhem

thanks guys. deffo seems to be that the fan wasn't secure in the first place. i'm in a whole new world of quietness now

zerodown

Checking in the bios may not be appropriate in this case as you want to see if the fan will hold out at high temps and the only way to do this is to boot up and stress it out for a while.

Also cold air coming from the back does not mean everything is cool, the northbridge is very important as it controls all the computions.

projectmayhem

zerodown wrote:

Also cold air coming from the back does not mean everything is cool, the northbridge is very important as it controls all the computions.

i don't mean cold air coming from the back... i mean a general coolness when i put my hand on the side (there are slits and holes on the side panel of my pc)...

zerodown

My bad ( Meant it in general) Depending on the case you should be fine, if anything well done you righted a wrong!! Just monitor it for a while and could be off some help to enable fan fail alarm in the bios just to be extra safe. But then again thats just me being careful lol!

projectmayhem

zerodown wrote:

My bad ( Meant it in general) Depending on the case you should be fine, if anything well done you righted a wrong!! Just monitor it for a while and could be off some help to enable fan fail alarm in the bios just to be extra safe. But then again thats just me being careful lol!

better to be careful then swimming in a sea of silicon later on

zerodown

Indeed with the replacement of a €400 chip on top of it. Best of luck with it mate