Wednesday, Jan. 1, 2013, 7:30 p.m. — Sadly, the rest of SKN was a bust for the most part; didn’t get to spend as much time in the shack today as I thought I could. Honey-do’s take priority over radioing. Pfft.
One non-radio project I wanted to tackle during the holidays was troubleshooting the noisy fan in my longtime desktop PC. For a couple of months I’ve had a fan that’s been intermittently “growling” while the ‘puter is operating. My fear was that the bad fan was in the power supply; if it went south I would be dead in the water until I secured a replacement. My plan was to find out what fan had the death rattle and secure a replacement before it goes belly-up.
There are three fans in the PC: the main cooling fan for the CPU and heat sink; the power supply fan; and the video card cooling fan. The power supply is the old BTX size, and I know I can’t get a replacement locally … but I didn’t want to buy one without knowing it was needed.
With the side of the case off, I determined the growling fan was not in the power supply. The bad fan seemed to be the main cooling fan located at the front of the PC, between the front of the case and the CPU. As you can see in the photo at right, `there’s a big honkin’ fan shroud that covers the CPU and its big-ass heat sink.
Dell did a good job engineering this setup; there are two screws that secure the fan shroud to the mother board. Once the screws are out, the fan shroud is hinged at its far right side to swing out, taking the CPU with it because the shroud is also attached to the CPU heat sink.
The problem is I didn’t know the shroud was attached to the heat sink AND the CPU.
With the screws out, the shroud wouldn’t budge. What the …? I pulled a little harder … nothing. Harder yet … nothing. One final hard tug and the shroud came loose — forcibly pulling the CPU out of its ZIF socket (only it was far from “zero force”).
My heart sank to my feet … had I just trashed the AMD processor of my PC?? I examined the processor …. no bent or missing pins. I flipped the lever up on the socket (better late than never, eh?) and wondered how i was going to get the CPU back in the socket (the PC was still upright on my desk) without bending a pin.
I removed the screws that attached the heat sink to the shroud, and with a flashlight and kinda-steady hand, inserted the CPU w/heat sink back into the motherboard socket. It went easily in place, and I locked the lever down. I’ll replace the shroud the next time I have the PC open, which won’t be too far down the road.
At this point I was convinced I had trashed the computer. I hit the power button … no magic smoke, a good sign. Lo and behold, the computer booted up just fine. But there’s that damn growling fan sound again! And as luck would have it, I immediately spotted the problem.
I upgraded the video card years ago to a 512 Meg card with better graphics. When I glanced at the card, I couldn’t help but notice the fan speed seemed to vary slightly with the growling sound. I put my finger on the fan to stop it momentarily and the noise disappeared.
Damn.
I ordered a new graphics card just like the new one I put in my identical PC in my library. It’s a 1GB card that uses a large heat sink instead of a fan (the card is taller than a single-width card, but fits just fine). One it arrives from New Egg I’ll install it and re-install the shroud.
Forcefully ripping my CPU from its socket is about all the excitement I can handle for New Year’s Day. I’m just thankful no harm was done, and that in the end, I was able to isolate the source of the growling fan.
-30-