Just running my own suspicions past the hive mind, here.
I built a PC in 2017 for my in-laws and my wife had gone down this weekend to help her Dad prepare for taxes. She said they booted up the PC and it had a fan error, and wouldn’t boot. I told her to bring the PC home with her and I’d take a look at it.
It’s a Noctua Low Profile fan, I had bought one for myself in 2014 and only just last year replaced it (with another but much larger Noctua) and didn’t expect to have any issues with a Noctua fan. But, I do believe that’s what’s happened here - the fan seems to have a problem. I tried to plug it into another fan control connector on the board, just to see if the issue might be with CPU_Fan, but no luck there. If I try to spin this fan with a flick of my fingers, it stubbornly refused to move more than a smidge, and I would have expected without power that it would spin freely.
I submitted a support request with Noctua as these have 6 year warranties, and also ordered a new one as they are not too much at forty bucks and she needs me to get this fixed so they can work on his tax stuff this next weekend. I figure I’ll RMA the fan and have another spare CPU fan, nothing wrong with that to have on hand, but just wanted to see if there was something else I could be testing/looking at in the meanwhile?
Nah, it’s just a dead fan. Anything with moving parts is gonna die sooner or later. Noctua is very high quality kit, you just got unlucky. Tell your father-in-law to stop smoking so much ganja around the computer, the resins are gunkin’ it up.
That’s a good idea - unfortunately it didn’t yield any fruit. Just a stubbornly rough spin.
I thought about this, and thanks for the link that’s what I was looking at, but I wasn’t 100% sure that it was the fan or possibly something with the entire assembly and I wasn’t 100% sure that fan would fit this for certain. I was mostly certain, but with a bit of a time crunch (and only a $20 savings) I felt it was worth it to just order the entire thing. What I may do is just take the fan off the new one and put it on the old radiator, since that’s a lot less work than swapping the entire thing out.
Thanks - I was pretty sure that was the deal, but I figured it was worth a thread just to get some more ideas given my wife wanted this fixed pronto.
I got an update from Noctua support already - those guys work fast. All they need me to do is break a few blades off the bad fan to render it inoperable, take a picture with my RMA number next to it and let them know the lot number and a screenshot of the invoice, and they’ll ship me a new fan! Those guys rock. I’ll do that at lunch, and just have a spare fan and radiator on hand, which is always handy.
