On 9/3/2010 6:04 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.)

I have run into similar problems that once defective fans were ruled out
proved to be a loose wire or cable bundle that was close enough to a fan
to randomly sag or get sucked into the fan blades. When the case was
opened to check on the problem it was moved just enough to stop doing it
and masking the problem. In one chassis it was a wire too close to a
CPU fan and on another it was a chassis fan. Both times repositioning
the wires fixed the problem.

Try using some string and loosely tie your cables together so that they
can not possibly sag and hit any of the fans and see if that clears up
the noise. If so then it's time for a little rerouting of the cables to
permanently eliminate the problem.