In the last couple days, there has been a low rumbling noise coming from my PC that I build just last July. Brand new everything, including a Western Digital 250 gigabyte hard drive. It goes away after a while, but tend to kick in after an intense activity (recently ZBrush). Is there anyway to check if it’s the hard drive or if it’s the power supply?
Reason I ask is because the desktop I had before seemed to have a faulty power supply and I replaced it when a similar noise started popping up. That took care of the problem, but every couple months it would continue to come back up again. I bought cheap power supplies back then, but when I put together this new shuttle pc I didn’t skimp out anywhere.
Sorry I didn’t get back to you guys sooner. Wow, my English in that first post is atrocious. Anyway, I ran both Speedfan and HDTune. Checked for bad sectors and general performance problems with nary an issue cropping up. Temps in Speedfan were around 45 to 55 C for my cores which seems to be average according to the Tom’s Hardware benching marking of my proc (Q9550). MY 8800 GT was about 77 C when relatively idle. Again, a little high, but nothing wrong according to sites I checked.
So, I unplugged everything including the power cord, grounded myself to the power supply, and proceeded to dust everything off as best I could. I ordered a can of compressed air which should arriving shortly. The problem went away, but it came back last night.
I took off the case and listened to where it was coming from. Not the PSU, not the hard drive, it was coming from the fan off the heatsink on the side of my Shuttle PC case. It’s on a hinge, so I pushed down on the latch and unclicked it, gently pulling it a little away from the heatsink. Problem “noise” goes away. It’s very close to the heat sink, just not snugly against it.
So, I put the case back on temporarily and haven’t heard the problem since. Could it be the case fan rubbing again the heat sink? Any idea what I can do? If the noise comes back it’s probably the fan going out I guess.
Probably the fan interfering with the heatsink. I believe the big aftermarket heatsink-fan guys have little sticky rubber strips the fan can sit on to prevent vibration. See if you can rig something up.
My Google Fu is weak apparently. I found one site that has cheap heatsink fan with the rubber strips for 5 bucks…but doesn’t ship to the U.S. Can’t find it anywhere else. Looked at cooling sites as well. No luck there either (doesn’t list whether fans come with rubber strips all other fans I didn’t bother checking because it seems weird to spent more than 20 bucks on some rubber strips).
These are special rubber strips that are heat resistant right? I mean they go on the heatsink itself from what I’ve seen on hardware review sites. Could I pick up something like that at an automotive place and cut it myself or would that just melt in that extreme temp?
You’re making this too complicated. The heatsink-fans I was talking about come with it already. Core temperature isn’t the same as heatsink temperature. Just shove something in there and stop the vibration! :)
Now someone can tell me about a computer that has melted down from advice like this.
