noisy Northbridge 8363A fan on GA-7ZXR r3

Lately I've noticed a noisy Northbridge 8363A fan on GA-7ZXR r3

For a long time it might make a little noise on first boot, then quiet. Now
it seems almost reversed. It doesn't seem to slow the fan down. It seems
that the root cause it a little play in the shaft.

I'm wondering if I should try to remove and lubricate it? with oil? or dry
lubricant?

Alternatively, perhaps I should look for a replacement? Any sources? I
wonder if the local Microcenter would have? It does not seem to be specific
to Gigabyte.

Looking for a little info, I find why the fan is (marginally) necessary on
KT133a. I run it at 133, but I do run cas3 mem - so it looks as if there's
no need to panic, ... yet. ?!

Any experiences with this, or answers to above?

TIA

RSP

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http://www.anandtech.com/printarticle.html?i=1405

Looking at the KT7A-RAID, it?s just what we expected. It looks pretty much
the same as the old KT7-RAID, with some minor changes in the choice of
components. One special thing about the ABIT KT7 series was the HSF
(heatsink/fan) unit on the VT8363 North Bridge. Recall from our experience
during the KT133 era, most manufacturers just put heatsinks on the 8363
North Bridge, while ABIT was the only manufacturer that put a complete HSF
unit on the North Bridge. We have discussed before that with KT133 chipset
neither the heat sink nor the fan is necessary for the North Bridge, even
though the chip gets relatively hot during heavy usage. It turns out that
with the new KT133A North Bridge, the situation gets quite interesting, but
we?ll save that discussion for later on in the review.
....
Assuming in general the VIA 8363A North Bridge is really capable of
running FSB speeds of 150MHz or even higher, that immediately poses a
potential problem. In our KT133 coverage, we have already discussed
that the VIA 8363 North Bridge got relatively hot during testing. But
it was not hot enough to require a heat sink, so the HSF unit on the
KT7-RAID was more or less overkill. But at that time, the North Bridge
was running at a max of 110MHz, whereas now the FSB speed could push
150MHz, which is about 36% faster. That would generate considerable
amounts of heat at the North Bridge, and possibly affect its operation.

As an experiment, we decided to take away the HSF unit on the VIA 8363A
North Bridge to see if we can still achieve the same kind of FSB speed. To
our surprise when we tried to set the FSB speed to 147MHz with no HSF on
the North Bridge, the system did not even POST. That proves our thought
that the North Bridge can?t sustain the heat generated. Now the question
is how much it is affected? We repeated our FSB tests and we found out
that 137MHz was the maximum FSB speed we could achieve without any HSF unit
on the North Bridge.

Several things can be inferred from all this. For starters, the North
Bridge is really dissipating quite a bit of heat. Thus, a heat sink on the
North Bridge seems to be mandatory for the KT133A chipset. With that in
mind, the addition of a fan on the KT7A-RAID?s North Bridge doesn?t seem to
be overkill anymore. In fact, it helps ensure that the heat generated by
the North Bridge would not be a limiting factor for FSB overclocking.