Stupid fans

So today I decided I'd finally try to deal with the fan issue in my desktop system at home, since the fan has been making all sorts of noise for a while now and it's the reason why I no longer leave the system on all the time the way that I prefer. Given that the sound varies a lot and seems to be linked to the system powering up the fan when it gets too hot, I figured it was probably the main fan.

With some help from a friend, I worked out what I probably needed and headed to Fry's. Which is almost all casemod fans, so I had a hard time finding quite what I wanted, but then I got something that seemed like it would probably work. (And also went grocery shopping, to try to make it more of a productive day.)

Well, I came home, took out the old fan, put in the new one, and the little sleave that holds the fan and slides it down over the heatpipe cooler in this Shuttle case wouldn't slide. Fan too thick. Crap. On top of that, the old fan was a 0.5 amp fan and this is only a 0.2 amp fan, so it wasn't clear that this fan could actually move enough air to do sufficient cooling.

However, rather than giving up on this, I was creative (since I didn't want to go back to the store). The metal tabs on the cheap little sleave would bend, so I bent them out, slipped the fan in so that the tabs were on the other side of its plastic mount, and bent them back again. There's room in the case for the fan to stick out a little. That worked fine, and I put the new fan in, and then realized that I'd put the fan in backwards so that the airflow was the wrong way. With this sort of case, I really don't trust that to be okay, so out it came again. This time, one of the metal tabs broke off, but I think three mount points for this fan is still fine. (Really, two is probably fine; it doesn't vibrate a lot and just needs to be held in front of the heat sink.)

Anyway, with the new fan installed, the system does seem a little quieter, but the video card fan is still making a lot of noise. I'm wondering if maybe the real problem all along has only been the video card fan and the fan that I took out is actually fine. *sigh*. But at least I learned a lot about changing fans, and I need to do this sort of thing more if I'm ever going to get more comfortable with hardware.

Tomorrow, if I'm feeling energetic, off comes the case again and I'll see if I can get the video card fan out easily. If I can and if it looks vaguely standard, it's back to Fry's to see if I can find a replacement for it as well.

I think this all counts for productivity on a vacation day, although it wasn't one of the things that I was planning on getting done. Oh well.