Arktis Posted January 29, 2007 Share Posted January 29, 2007 So my GPU fan died on me. It was causing system lockups for about 2 months until I finally made the discovery. I have been running on the standard non-accelerated nv driver until now. I didn't have any spare fans, so I took the one off of my case door and taped it onto the graphics card with electrical tape. I am a total cheapskate. It's working superbly for the time being, and it's a fairly large fan so I have no doubt that it is way better than the one that came with the card. What I am wondering is, was this really wise? Is the tape going to melt and ruin the card and/or allow the fan drop off and start rattling around inside my case, or what? What should I use instead? The tape was the only thing I had handy at the time, and keep in mind how unbelievably cheap and impatient I am. If I can't get something locally down the street for cheap, I don't really want it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
S0V13T Posted January 29, 2007 Share Posted January 29, 2007 You won't believe how long I've been waiting for a topic like this. Speaking as a man who once rigged up a beer cap to hold an Intel fan onto an AMD processor, and routinely wedges fans inbetween video cards and PCI cards, let me be the first to comment on this one. Depending on where you taped the fan in, over heating and melting IS very likely to happen. However, if it does melt, it probabally won't cause any damage to the card directelly, but it WILL stink up the place nicely, and all that melted plastic will eventually muck up the internals of your card. If you're gonan use tape, stay the hell away from the core (the hot squarish thing on the top side of the card) and the memory chips (the black rectangles) as they generate a lot heat. If your mother board has a lot of PCI slots, you might want to try wedging a fan in. You can do this by having a wide PCI card (such as an Audigy 2 sound card) into the fourth slot (counting from the top slot, then downwards). The way it's spaced out you can carefully wedge in an 80 mm fan inbetween your AGP video card, and whatever card you have in the fourth slot. Make sure your comp is powerd off for this, eh? You can either leave your side panel out, and have the fan blow the air out of the case, or you can take the PCI guards out of all the slots (the metal tab thingies that get in your way when you try to install a PCI device thats built into the rear of the case), and position the fan to blow air out those slots. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arktis Posted January 29, 2007 Author Share Posted January 29, 2007 The fan JUST NOW started to make strange noises the exact instant I hit the reply button... Good idea. Not sure it will work, but I'll see. Yes I am aware of the "hot spots", and I stayed away from them. Now if you will excuse me, I am going to investigate a strange and alarming noise :o PS I laughed pretty hard when I read your beer can anecdote. ;D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Megalith Posted January 29, 2007 Share Posted January 29, 2007 yeah you no doubt will end up causing more problems, i would try and bolt it onto the card if its possible failing that i would use a wedge as S0V says. You could also not have a fan on the card at all if the case is cooled well enough but you would need to ensure that the card isnt overheating. the cost of a new grfx card is more than it would be to get the fan fixed in place properly. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
GorunNova Posted January 29, 2007 Share Posted January 29, 2007 Heh... as another guy who's known for tossing random fans in his tower, I'd say go for it... but only after checking to see if you can get a replacement fan. If losing the card doesn't bother you, go right ahead... it may work, and work well! On the other hand, if you really -don't- want to buy a new card, wait and get a proper fan. What exactly is this card, anyways? If it can run with just a fan without a heat sink, it can't be very recent... and if there IS a heat sink between this fan and the GPU, then it should be pretty easy to tape or glue it in place. The fact that it lived at all after two months with a dead fan suggests that it's not very recent... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kyran Posted January 29, 2007 Share Posted January 29, 2007 super glue it to the heatsink i have a fan on my sons screwed to the back of the computer blowing down across the graphics card cos his was getting too hot he has one on the heatsink aswell cheapo 5900 card they didn't allow for overclocking even tho they give you the toolos Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest c4evap Posted January 30, 2007 Share Posted January 30, 2007 One word: [move]TOP BLOWHOLE.[/move] OK, that's two. :D I've had the heatsink for my CPU "tie-wrapped" to my mother board for over a year. The "cradle" that the heatsink clips attached to had just snapped off one day. I recently located a replacement "cradle" and bought a new heatsink w/fan. Although the tie-wrap worked perfectly, it just bothered me so I finally took care of the issue. c4 ;D Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Chiggy Posted January 30, 2007 Share Posted January 30, 2007 This is a break the bank solution..........spend a massive 40 British Pence on a 8cm fan. Super glue that fan to the heatspreader on your graphics card over the top of the hole where the fan sits on the card. Connect the fan to a molex connector. Or if you have 2 British Pounds and 50 pence to spend buy a PCI card with fan, fit that under your graphics card. I would recommend option 2 is saves messing about. By the way that beeping sound is probably telling you you GPU has reached a temperature over 120.........bad news. Then again you could establish if you card is still under warranty from the manufacturer. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
bones2097 Posted January 31, 2007 Share Posted January 31, 2007 haha you guys......... ::) a solution better than tape is to get your hands on some garden wire (bendy plastic-coated wire- usually green).... use this in the same fashion you used tape.... thats what i did, heres my story.... yeah i decided to upgrade my duron 600 to a 1300 (the fastest 200mhs FSB btw...) before they stopped making them, well after flashing the bios it worked, but the chipset always reached boiling point.... so my solution was to bend a speare hdd clamp i had, straight, screwed it to the case, & tried a fans to it, placing it directly over the chipset.... then cus i wanted to put the lid back on, I drew out a rough square of were the fan would be & drilled tons of hole... :) last but not lest i was forced to underclock it down to 1200 mhz.... well still twice as fast as before!!! works like a charm, can leave it running 24/7 but the psu is a bit noisy.... so i'm gonna crack that open when i get some free time & bung a slient ish fan!! ......................................... ::) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arktis Posted February 9, 2007 Author Share Posted February 9, 2007 I want to read more stories. Come on! Well anyways, it lasted all this time without any problems, so all of you who thought it would fail and/or break something were totally wrong! :o Couple points of clarification: 1.) The card was an FX 5200. 2.) Rounding DOWN, the fan I used is roughly 3''x3''x1''. More than enough, no? Pretty powerful little sucker, too... I've already bruised two fingertips on it. If the blades were sharp, then I'd have lost some blood. Even with all that cooling power, a specific area of the card was still getting really hot (even with the fan directly on it) while the rest stayed surprisingly cool. I think that denotes a problem with the board... :P It was working okay though... basically, my x server was no longer crashing during 3d accelerated game play... or so I thought. Instead of locking up right away, it took a lot longer with the fan on it. Around 3-4 single player missions in Freespace 2 Open. Again, the rest of the board was staying nice and cool, which was unusual. So I think my FX 4200 is b0rked. :'( I just took it out just now and swapped in an older card. Good news though, the two boards I have in there now don't require fans. I'm using an ancient agp TNT2 for my 2ndary display and a GeForce MX 4000 for my primary display. Not exactly top of the line, but good enough for me. I don't need a powerful gpu. Now I am tring to figure out what to do with my 3" fan. Yes, the fan blade part alone has a 3" diameter. Any ideas? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
TetsuoShima Posted February 9, 2007 Share Posted February 9, 2007 an fx5200? :o Those things don't need active cooling really, just a small passive heatsink should do just fine. If that thing was over heating that something more must have been going on. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kyran Posted February 9, 2007 Share Posted February 9, 2007 we have two boxes with fx5200's in them both cards came with overclocking software :) Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Megalith Posted February 9, 2007 Share Posted February 9, 2007 use that 3 inch fan on the case cooling down the entire case will help all kinds of things work better you probably have an external fan connection on the mobo somewhere that you can connect too if not you should be able to parallel it up with the proc fan extracting heat from inside a case cant be expressed hard enough when it comes to it if you are taking the heat from the cpu and gpu and it isnt going anywhere then over a week of constant useage that case is going to get pretty warm and it will cause problems, some chips on a motherboard are not designed to operate on temperatures above 40°C and will misread 0's as 1's big problem and blue screens of death will be the price you pay. the fact that only the gpu gets hot on the grfx carf is normal the other chips dont need to process the high speeds of data some chips only switch things these are the ones you dont want hot. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Arktis Posted February 10, 2007 Author Share Posted February 10, 2007 use that 3 inch fan on the case cooling down the entire case will help all kinds of things work better you probably have an external fan connection on the mobo somewhere that you can connect too if not you should be able to parallel it up with the proc fan extracting heat from inside a case cant be expressed hard enough when it comes to it if you are taking the heat from the cpu and gpu and it isnt going anywhere then over a week of constant useage that case is going to get pretty warm and it will cause problems' date=' some chips on a motherboard are not designed to operate on temperatures above 40°C and will misread 0's as 1's big problem and blue screens of death will be the price you pay. the fact that only the gpu gets hot on the grfx carf is normal the other chips dont need to process the high speeds of data some chips only switch things these are the ones you dont want hot.[/quote'] o.O There are only two punctuation marks in that entire mess. Yeah... I guess I will just slap the fan back on the case door. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Recommended Posts
Please sign in to comment
You will be able to leave a comment after signing in
Sign In Now