On 9/3/2010 7:04 PM, poachedeggs wrote:
I thought I'd had a bad fan in my semi-homebuilt pc. I was getting a
terrible few minutes of noise, what seemed like friction buzzing/
grinding sound. After repeated oiling over a few weeks did nothing or
only solved - or more likely seemed to solve - the problem for a day,
I got in touch with AMD who eventually diagnosed a faulty fan and
heatsink, which they replaced. Within a few hours the same noises
were present, that to me seem consistent with a dodgy fan, but what
are the chances. As far as I know the paste is applied right - it was
pre-applied and i assume spread by the fitting pressure and clipping
in of the heatsink.

What else can make that kind of noise? The cpu itself? The power
supply? A motherboard fault? I've turned things like the Q-Fan and
Cool 'n' Quiet settings off or on in the BIOS, with no change.

The pc case is the cheapest possible CIT with a 450w power supply. i
don't know enough about these things but assumed that a bad power
supply was one that didn't work and a good one was one that did, i.e.
I was assuming that power would be constant and not lead ot any of
these noises.

It's often fine for most of the day but then will start ot make that
noise, and then that'll stop pretty abruptly as if the computer was
changing gears.

Any ideas? Thanks all.

(3ghz dual core AMD, 320 hd, 4gb ram, Windows 7 64 bit/ Ubuntu 10.04
64 bit/ XP 32 bit triple-boot, though the same symptoms have occurred
with any one or two of these installed.)

Any fan in the case can make that noise. You have the CPU fan, the power
supply fan, the case fans, plus you could have one or two video card
fans. Any one of these can make that sound.
The only other spinning parts are the hard drive and the optical drive.
But you would be having tangible issues if they were grinding I would think.