The fan is rather ancient, and came out of an old PSU, a really old PSU........ the fan is 90mm square and has an aluminium body. It's one of those old quality items that people used to make in the old days, I've used it on previous systems, sold it, bought it back, and now here it is again!
At 12volts default wiring, it roars away with quite a blast of air eminating from it, so I moved the positive wire to the 5volt position on the other side of the connector, and voila!, a nice quiet CPU fan, it will have to go back to 12volts in summer though.
I made the fan skirt out of ice-cream container plastic, (my favorite PC ducting material - comes in assorted colors!).
The original CPU fan (more on that in a minute) came perched on a light plastic base which screws down onto the Heatsink. I used that base for the same purpose, and used hotglue to attach the duct material to it and the above mentioned fan. The original screws attach the unit to the heatsink on the original base, now part of the new fan housing. Some old mainboard/case mounts provided the right size plugs to hold the fan grate in place temporarily until a more permanent solution can be found.
I hope you like my garbage recycled Fan Mod ;D
______________________________________________
There are five fans here in my rig, and this is their story....
1. cpu fan..... we already know it's story. But what about my new shiny AMD boxed fan? Well, it's vibrating and noisy and scaring the cat, I keep thinking it's about to BLOW at any minute, so it's off to be replaced if I could be bothered to do so, I have little use of warranty on PC parts, and warranties seem to have little use for me, I never seem to get them honored, "we haven't recieved it", "we haven't heard from the manufacturer on that yet", "you spoke to who?", "when was it sent" etc, etc, etc. why bother........... especially when the good parts are at the dump right?
2. case fan - it's a clear one with a red light in it, provides easy on the eyes lighting in darkened gaming room. It siezed up about a year or more ago, but decided to come back to life after I nearly destroyed it trying to fix it. It's got ok airflow for an 80mm case fan, and here I have it feeding the cpu fan with cool, outside the case air.
3. chipset fan - this cools the nForce4 SLI chip which is kinda like a northbridge chip. In a nutshell, this fan is a known disaster and Asus are doing their best to replace the defective part worldwide (so the press release states).
It's got a record breaking 3 week lifespan and my fan expires in 3 days, The nForce4 chip needs active cooling (a fan and heatsink) on this board, apparently because the chip runs quite hot. There is no room for a large heatsink on the board.
I'm currently considering my options and wonder if it's worth sacrificing the boards warranty if I replace the fan myself, rather than go months without a PC waiting for Asus to fix my new computer. Oh dear, I alreadt made up my mind, you see, there is that warranty thing rearing up it's head again. Absolutely USELESS.
4. video gpu fan - this one is working on a leadtek card as supplied. I got another Leadtek card 13 months ago.
The fan in Leadtek card's lasts exactly 1 year and 4 days, just to ensure there is no possible chance of warranty claims. I sent leadtek the card 3 weeks ago, and I never expect to see it again, another $300 down the drain.
5. PSU fan - they go forever and you must never clean them, let them clog up totally with dirt and insect nests and they last even longer. This is because any attempt at repairing these suckers could result in death by electrocution, so in their wisdom, PSU makers use robust fans ! ;)
Next week......... "Monitors or Monsters" stay tuned.
Mainboard: Asus P5K-Premium, CPU=Intel E6850 @ x8x450fsb 3.6ghz, RAM: 4gb PC8500 Team Dark, Video: NV8800GT, HDD: 2x1Tb Samsung F3 RAID-0 + 1Tb F3, PSU: Antec 550 Basiq, OS: Win7x64, Display: 24&
