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From: "nobody >" on 20 Feb 2010 19:21
poachedeggs wrote:

> Could this be simply because my home is unheated? February in England
> and no central heating, which I can't rectify without trebling my
> electricity bill. My laptop and netbook and other appliances cope and
> have for fifteen years here. I would prefer to ignore this factor if
> anything else is also possible, simply because this factor is
> unresolvable.
>

Simple cause, gummy lube in one of the fan motors.

I've had the same thing happen with quite a few different "things" when
they have either been out in the shed (unheated)or sat in the car
overnight when it's cold outside when I fired them up in the house.

Your desktop has at least two fans, the one in the power supply and the
CPU fan (I know there are fanless CPU coolers..).

You may also have a fan on your video card and/or your mobo's chipset.

You probably also have a case fan or two if this was a custom rig.

ID'ing the culprit is easy.

First, power down the machine.
Poke something non-metallic like a chopstick, wooden skewer, cotton
swab, tyrap, etc into each fan (one at a time) to stop it from spinning.

Power it back up. If the noise stops, you have the culprit.

If not, keep going until you find the noisy fan.

Actually fixing it boils down to your mechanical skills, as well as what
you feel comfortable doing.

1)Cheap way is to relube the fan.

Others may have different opinions, but plain old "3 in 1" oil works
reasonably well on sleeve bearings.
Ball-type bearings need something heavier, I use spray-can motorcycle
chain lube or "white lithium grease" in a pointy squeeze tube.

WD40/LPS etc might quiet the noise for a bit, but they aren't really
decent fan lubes. But, they often will dissolve/thin out/soften up the
existing lube so that it does work for a long time. YMMV. I've done
this, with about a 50% pass rate. Just be ready to go back in and use a
real lube if the "magic spray" doesn't pan out.

I'm an "oldus fartus", I remember the BrylCreem slogan:
"A little dab'll do ya".
Apply *any* lube sparingly. One drop is plenty, some large fans can use two.

There are some fans that you just can't get apart far enough to get lube
into.
There's also the electrical hazard involved when opening a power supply,
the capacitors can store a large amount of moderately high-voltage for a
long time even when disconnected.

Your call here....

2) Replace the fan

Hope this helps.



From: SteveH on 21 Feb 2010 05:55
poachedeggs wrote:
> I have got a custom built machine: Asus M2N68-AM SE2 motherboard with
> an AMD Athlon I X2 250 3 ghz CPU, plus 320 hd drive, 4 gb RAM
> (Buffalo, PC6400, a compatible speed with the m/b), PNY Nvidia G210
> card, running Windows 7 64 bit.
>
> I had some instability problems when I'd had some apparently faulty
> Elixir RAM - blue screens, and warped thing shappening on the
> display. For a little while, waiting for the Elixir to be replaced by
> a second stick of Buffalo RAM - asked for by me because the other one
> seems fine - I only had 3gb, adding a 1gb generic stick that came with
> the machine. Today is the first time the CPU has made this terrible
> grinding din. It stopped doing this after I shut down and started
> again.

Did you listen to this noise with the side off, to try and identify exactly
where the noise is coming from? It does sound to me like dodgy fan bearings,
but you need to identify it better. If it is the CPU fan, it may be worth
getting the CPU cooler/fan changed for something better, like those from
Arcitc Cooling.

> My BIOS has sections for both Q-fan and Cool 'n' Quiet, but both these
> things seem to do the same job, which I'm a bit muddled about, and the
> little manual hasn't been enlightening. I had Q-fan enabled for a
> while, and then I disabled it as it didnt seem to do anything. Now I
> have Cool 'n' Quiet enabled.
>
No, C&C thottles the CPU which then allows the CPU fan to run slower, if
Q-Fan is enabled (at least that's my understanding of it!)


--
SteveH


From: TVeblen on 21 Feb 2010 09:16
On 2/21/2010 5:07 AM, poachedeggs wrote:
<Snip>
>
> What's your opinion on this? I started reading up about whether a
> cold home could be bad for a pc, and saw some advice to stop at the
> BIOS stage in cold conditions to let the machine warm up. The
> terrible din hasn't recurred - the only reason I'm not at present
> reacting to your splendid advice - and I've also moved the pc to the
> least cold part of the room.
>
<Snip>

No. Heat is the enemy of electronics. Not cool-ness.
A fan squeal is a mechanical issue. It would be aggravated by cold
conditions but that does not change the fact that the fan is defective
is some way - usual;ly correctable by proper oiling as the others have
pointed out.
Other than BIOS error code beeping, I can not think of a single instance
where a noise coming from anywhere but the speakers could be software
related.

From: poachedeggs on 21 Feb 2010 12:59
On 21 Feb, 14:16, TVeblen <Killtherob...(a)hal.net> wrote:
> On 2/21/2010 5:07 AM, poachedeggs wrote:
> <Snip>
>
> > What's your opinion on this?  I started reading up about whether a
> > cold home could be bad for a pc, and saw some advice to stop at the
> > BIOS stage in cold conditions to let the machine warm up.  The
> > terrible din hasn't recurred - the only reason I'm not at present
> > reacting to your splendid advice - and I've also moved the pc to the
> > least cold part of the room.
>
> <Snip>
>
> No. Heat is the enemy of electronics. Not cool-ness.
> A fan squeal is a mechanical issue. It would be aggravated by cold
> conditions but that does not change the fact that the fan is defective
> is some way - usual;ly correctable by proper oiling as the others have
> pointed out.
> Other than BIOS error code beeping, I can not think of a single instance
> where a noise coming from anywhere but the speakers could be software
> related.

We can ignore the fan noise now, it occured only yesterday and has
stopped. I just need to learn more about my other enquiries here, the
instability with W7 - Windows Explorer crashing and whether it's to do
with awrong bios setting in relation to my 800mhz ram etc. I've put
the posting on Asus' own forum too but it seems fairly moribund there.

Thanks for any further input.
From: SteveH on 21 Feb 2010 14:18
poachedeggs wrote:
> On 21 Feb, 14:16, TVeblen <Killtherob...(a)hal.net> wrote:
>> On 2/21/2010 5:07 AM, poachedeggs wrote:
>> <Snip>
>>
>>> What's your opinion on this? I started reading up about whether a
>>> cold home could be bad for a pc, and saw some advice to stop at the
>>> BIOS stage in cold conditions to let the machine warm up. The
>>> terrible din hasn't recurred - the only reason I'm not at present
>>> reacting to your splendid advice - and I've also moved the pc to the
>>> least cold part of the room.
>>
>> <Snip>
>>
>> No. Heat is the enemy of electronics. Not cool-ness.
>> A fan squeal is a mechanical issue. It would be aggravated by cold
>> conditions but that does not change the fact that the fan is
>> defective is some way - usual;ly correctable by proper oiling as the
>> others have pointed out.
>> Other than BIOS error code beeping, I can not think of a single
>> instance where a noise coming from anywhere but the speakers could
>> be software related.
>
> We can ignore the fan noise now, it occured only yesterday and has
> stopped. I just need to learn more about my other enquiries here, the
> instability with W7 - Windows Explorer crashing and whether it's to do
> with awrong bios setting in relation to my 800mhz ram etc. I've put
> the posting on Asus' own forum too but it seems fairly moribund there.
>
> Thanks for any further input.

Could just be the Elixir memory, I've never had any luck with it, and I've
tried it on a few builds. If I do a build for someone now, they pay for
Crucial or get a PC with no memory.

--
SteveH


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