Techie Help From The Group Mind, Please

[filkertom]

Remember awhile back when my hard drive was making noise and I replaced it? Yeah, it turned out it wasn't the hard drive: it was the fan to my Nvidia 8600GT graphics card with 512 MB DDR2 RAM (manufactured by Sparkle), which was gunked up all to hell and apparently fwapping against the power connection wire to the board itself.

So I took the thing apart, and cleaned it up nicely, and put it back with fresh thermal grease, and was quite proud of myself.

And now it won't work.

I put it back in, see, and booted up just fine, and got into a game, which promptly dropped to one-fourth its normal frame rate. I got out of that, and tried Quake 3 Arena, which was about 40% its normal frame rate. Not knowing what was going on, I rebooted.

And the reboot stuck on the screen identifying the graphics card.

I picked up the machine to look at it. I smelled something overheating. The fan on the graphics card was not running.

I've taken it apart a couple of times now, and tried reseating everything as firmly as possible. The fan just budges, and then nothin'.

Any ideas? I really don't want to buy a new graphics card.

ETA: I bought a new graphics card.

Three different shops told me that they didn't have fans to fit my board, because the proprietary fan/heat sink simply wouldn't match up with anything they had, and I could likely spend a couple hours cobbling something together that would work. (Best Buy never answered the goddamn phone, except to put me on hold multiple times.) I said fuggit and spent $89 on an MSI N9500GT, also with 512 MB DDR2 RAM. It is markedly faster than the 8600GT. Also, it's got passive cooling, a big ol' Buick of a heat sink, so it doesn't have or need a fan, and it is frickin' silent. (A 9400GT would've cost $20 less but actually needed more power supply than I have; anything cheaper would've been a rather big drop in speed from what I had.)

So, thanks, you guys. I am up and running again. And believe me when I say this, from the bottom of my heart:

Please buy my stuff at Windy.

ETA2: Annoyance.

Oh, the card works fine. But everybody online has it for about $60.

The DDR3 RAM version.

They also have the 1 GB DDR2 RAM version... for about $60.

I like buying local. I really do. It's important to me. But I can't help but feel I've been taken, a bit.

Murfle.

ETA3: I don't feel as bad. I dug a little deeper, and realized that I had the MSI N9500 GT MD512Z/D2, which is more around the $85 range. So that helps a lot.

Man, I don't know shit about what cards are on the market anymore.

Comments

[solarbird]

You could just buy a replacement fan. There are a lot of aftermarket fans for all sorts of things. Check out the overclocking supply sites.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

I may do that, at the local shop that had the thermal grease. :)

[poly-scott.livejournal.com]

This is your best bet. Unfortunately, all my parts are in storage or I would just give you a fan. I have several in all different shapes and sizes. You might find that replacing that card is not as expensive as you think, also.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Appreciate it, but as it is nothing seems to fit except from the factory. Which, of course, is in Taiwan.

[ohari.livejournal.com]

Do you have a can-o-air? I've revivified some near-dead fans that were gunked up by using the compressed gas and the little tube to spin the fan really, really fast, which served to either clear out or grind up the gunk, letting the fan work normally again. Is the fan/cooler itself replacable without buying a whole new card?

Is it possible you got some of the thermal grease into the fan itself?

I can't count the number of times I've found fans rubbing cables inside PCs. Depending on what cable and how big/fast the fan is it makes half a dozen different sounds, only one of which sounds like fan rubbing on cable.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

I do have a can-o-air, which didn't budge the thing. I think I can indeed replace the fan, which I'm going to go try to do in a few minutes.

No grease in the fan. The fan is on one side of a heat sink; the other side is where the grease is.

[ohari.livejournal.com]

If the can-o-air won't move it, it's toast. Probably plastic shavings from the rubbing got into the bearings and melted.

[tandw.livejournal.com]

I had an NVidia chipset board made by EWGA (I think). The onboard fan crapped out after only a few months, completely packed with dust, but the board lasted for another year-and-a-half w/o a fan. (I wasn't overclocking, though.)

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Three guys from three shops could not budge the fan. The new card has no fan, and a heat sink that could give Godzilla a lump on the noggin.

[dave-ifversen.livejournal.com]

As long as the chip the fan cools hasn't been damaged by the overheating, you should be able to just replace the fan and call it good. The can-o-air thing usually only works for a while - when the fan gets that bad, it usually means the bushings (most of these cheap fans don't bother with bearings, they use bronze sleeve bushings) are on their way out and it should be replaced anyway.

[bedlamhouse]

This.

Remember that you smell the magic smoke before you see it. I wouldn't be too confident in the shape of the chip, it only takes a few seconds without cooling to completely fry.

[armb.livejournal.com]

Sadly true. I had a similar situation at work, and the fix was "here's a new graphics card".

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Which is what I has here -- look up top. :-7

[johnridley.livejournal.com]

I've never had a fan actually burn out - the bushing just gets seized due to solidified cruddy oil. In each case, I've pulled off the sticker over the center, removed the clip holding the shaft in, pulled the fan out, cleaned the bushing and axle with alcohol, put in a drop of GOOD lube like tri-flow, and put it back together. Total time about 3 minutes, and I don't think I ever had a fan so repaired fail again.

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

You probably would not have been able to get that fan off the GPU in the first place. Most are put in place with thermally conductive epoxy.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Oh, getting it off the board was easy. There was a thin layer of thermal stuff there, but the whole plastic fan/heat sink case is held in by screws. No problem even taking the fan itself off the core, with the magnets and copper wire and the flashback to grade school science and my Radio Shack experiment kits. Hardest part of the whole thing was not getting fresh thermal grease on my hands.

[poltr1]

Late to the party, as usual, but glad you're up and running again.

[nimitzbrood.livejournal.com]

Also late to the party but if the fan won't move then it's likely one of the sleeve style fans with solid graphite slip bearings and is dead.

If you catch them buzzing before they fail you can usually pull them off the heat sink, peel back the label on them, and fill the hole with a mixture of machine oil and graphite powder and they'll run until the oil and shavings get used up or dry out. Usually another six months at least.

A similar thing used to happen to the earlier models of Makita palm sanders.

This is why I make sure that anything I buy with a muffin fan on/in it has ball bearing style fans. Those aren't foolproof either but last a lot longer.

And it's no surprise that you couldn't find a replacement fan - most of the ones on graphics cards are custom made for that _run_ of that _model_ card. Can we say captive market and planned obsolescence?

That said there _are_ stick-on replacement fan/heat sink units for graphics and motherboard chipsets out there but they're usually only found at the massive marketplace style computer shows.

Usually in the back corner. ;-)

[tomreedtoon.livejournal.com]

nimitzbrood, I'm afraid those fairs are gone. The Orlando one hasn't appeared in eight months. No clients to rent space, I guess.

Just so you know, Tom, you got off lucky. In the computer I'm using now, the fan seized up on my graphic card, and took out the card AND the LCD monitor as well. Had to replace both.

[nimitzbrood.livejournal.com]

Wow. I was going to possibly refute that but it seems you're right. (http://www.supercomputersale.com/)

Bummer. Those were some of the best places to get the odd and wonderful pieces of hardware and flotsam for doing wonderful custom geekery.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Well. Given that I also bought a monitor I did not want to buy a couple of months back, I do indeed feel lucky. Because that would've really sucked.

[tomreedtoon.livejournal.com]

In my neck of the woods, it was www.marketproshows.com - and they seem to have abandoned Florida and the Southeast completely, and are only operating in Maryland and thereabouts now.

[kyril.livejournal.com]

I don't know of any component other than video cards where the brick-and-mortar MSRPs are significantly higher than the online MSRPs. But when you need a new part immediately, it's still usually cheaper than overnight shipping. (Until you count sales tax, anyway.)

The good news is how many games run just fine with what by today's standards is a modest to low-end card. I'm still doing OK at 1280x1024 on an 8600. Mostly. Though I did have to turn down some settings in City of Heroes last night, so it may be time to budget to spend another $100-$150 next time I buy a new/bigger monitor than 19" non-wide. But I think I still have 2x FSAA on, I could turn that off for a major boost if I had to.

[filkertom.livejournal.com]

Very true. However, it's not just the SFX. I'm running a ViewSonic 24" widescreen (an absolute joy not just because of gaming -- do you have any idea how useful it is to open up the music software and be able to see all those tracks, all the effects, and the entire frickin' mixer at once!? I'm never going back to anything smaller than 22"). That's just a lot of pixels to push around.

[kyril.livejournal.com]

I'm already looking at spending around $300 on a Dell 2209WA (only 22" but supposedly the color rendition is much better than a regular TN panel) for photography. Plus $100-$150 for a color calibration system. Plus now maybe $150 for a video card.

Nope, not this Christmas.

[bryanp.livejournal.com]

Glad you got it sorted out.

I buy local for a lot of things, but computer parts? It depends on the urgency and how much the retail markup is going to be. Some stuff the price difference isn't so bad. The markup on cables of any sort is larcenous. "Sure, I'll pay $58 for an HDMI cable at a retail outlet. Why would I order one for $4 at Monoprice? Surely it couldn't be anywhere near as good."