Seriously, it's an annoying whirring/grinding sound. It's been happening on and off for the last year, and usually once i take the case off and clean it out, things return to normal. But the past couple of days it's been getting worse.

The source of the noise is little fan on the bottom of my motherboard. I'm not sure what it's purpose is though. Is it to cool the video card? I don't want to start fucking around with things until i know what they are.

Any ideas???

Nobody knows what that little bastard is supposed to be cooling???

You're better off getting answers at the Refuge.

pfft, they don't know anything.

I think i'm going to make an audio recording of this puppy after work. The noise it makes is hilarious, but horribly annoying.

I don't know, try blowing into that fan? There's probably some dust or other crud in there that's causing it to rub.

That used to work for a while. I would unplug the computer and clean that fan out and it would be fine, sometimes for months at a time. When it became more frequent i vacuumed it out which also work. But now it's at a point where it's beyond a nuissance and nothing i do seems to fix it.

Presumably i could just swap out the fan, but since i don't even know what it's purpose is and what it's attached to i'm a bit hesitant to start taking thing apart just yet. I emailed the manufacturer but i don't know how much support they'll provide other than hopefully telling me what it is. I suspect that i am long out of the warranty period.

Find the make/model of the motherboard and then search google for that board online. you'll likely find some kind of details about it.

hey has anyone seen my hamster lately?

Fucking tech support was no help. The couldn't even figure out what it is, though the douchebag seemed quite confident that the fan was hardmounted to the motherboard and that replacing the fan would warrant replacing the entire motherboard..

So i'll try your idea buggy. Any idea on where i would find the make and model of the motherboard? The documentation that came with the pc is all generic and doesn't make reference to specific hardware components.

If that fails i'm just going to unplug that power cable and see what happens.

does your mother board have an on board graphics card? if so it could be cooling the mother boards graphics card chip

nope. i talked to a few techs and they seemed to think it was a 'chipset fan'...whatever the hell that is. I just unplugged the little guy and i haven't been bothered since. I was monitoring my temperatures for a while but nothing got overly hot during intense usage and graphics processing so i'm gonna leave it as is.

Should be right on the motherboard itself. If it's not on there, and not in the docs, it's probably a generic POS.

?

The 'noisy' fan there is the motherboard chipset fan. (The big one is the CPU fan)
Some motherboard manufacturers are notorious for putting fans on the chipset that fail/make noises after a relatively short period of time. While theoretically it's possible to pull those fans apart and oil up the bearings, it's usually just easier to put a replacement fan on there.
Another option is to replace the fan and heatsink on the chipset with a beefier heatsink that doesn't require a fan. (heatsink is just that lump of metal underneath the fan which helps drain heat from the chip)

It's a relatively simple procedure if you know what you're doing, but if in doubt, get someone knowledgeable or a shop to fix it. Shouldn't take them more than 5 minutes to fix.

I'm not sure what the going price is for a suitable chipset fan but they're usually pretty cheap, not more than say $30 or so.

i remember that game