#1

Think I might need to replace my cooling fan, sometimes it gets stuck making a shitty whirring noise.

Is this easy enough to do without fucking up? Seems like I might need to use thermal paste and unscrew a bunch of stuff which sounds scary.

#2

Yeah I have it was easy enough. Most difficult thing was trying to get all the cables to fit in the case at the end, and I spent ages trying to screw the CPU fan into place before realising I had to rotate it by 90 degrees

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#3

Any nerds here ever built a PC?

Of course they fucking have :wink:

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#4

My Dad used to build loads. Since, retirement he doesn’t fiddle with computers as much (in the hardware sense). He still uses them to surf the web and play freecell.

#5

I’ve built the one, seven years ago, and I’ve been keeping it fairly up to date since though it’s definitely showing its age.

Have you moved had a look inside? The whirring noise could be that the cooling fan is catching on a cable in there. That started happening to me after I moved home and was easy to fix.

Depending on the cooling fan, it might just have plastic bolts that pop out when you twist them. And replacing thermal paste is a bit of a chore but I wouldn’t say it’s a challenge.

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#6

thanks man I’ll have a look inside the case tomorrow :slight_smile:

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#7

Might just need a good clean rather than replaced. Grab yourself a big old can of whup-ass (compressed air) and get medieval on it’s ass (carefully and methodically get rid of all the dust and shite that’s built up in there.)

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#8

And if you do need to replace, a new fan will include thermal paste.

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#9

Yeah, it’s way, way easier than you’d think. It’s basically Lego with RGB lighting.

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#10

I’ve done a few. You can definitely do it, especially with the help of YouTube and DiS.

Worth noting there are probably at least two fans in there - one on the CPU (which is the one you need thermal paste for), and another built into the power supply. There could be one (or even two) on the graphics card too, depending what you’ve got.

It’s pretty unlikely to be the one in the power supply that’s making a noise, but it’s worth checking.

If it gets worse when the computer is doing more work, then it’s more likely to be the one on the processor or graphics card. Do what @The_Cosh said first though - could save you some money.

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#11

I have, but not for a good 10/15 years.

Changing the fan isn’t too tricky, but check that everything is back properly, and see if you can get an application for your computer that tells you the temperature that the cpu is running at so that you can monitor if it’s overheating.

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