Noisy CPU-fan on a vista 64-bit system

Howdy,

I've been running this system for almost 3 years now, and powerwise I'm still quite satisfied with the machine. The noise however is not satisfactory, and has not been for more than a year now. Last week it became so bad that even a closed door did not keep the noise out of the room next door.

The fan on the CPU is the factory supplied one, I've updated the gpu-fan with a Zalman about a year ago thinking that this was the problem, it was not.

What strikes me is that it does not seem to have anything to do with the actual CPU temperature, but more with the immediate cpu-load, resulting in a constantantly changing fan noise frequence that makes the machine impossible to work on. I've tried 'fan control' but no luck, and the bios-setting is supposed to be 'intelligent' so that it changes the speed accordingly. Only other setting is 'full power', aka not very pleasant.

Does anyone have any idea of what I can do to fix this fustrating problem, short of buying a new machine or upgrading the fan? I vacuum the fan and heatsink roughly once a month, it does not seem to help a bit.

Any help is greatly appreciated, and please let me know if further information is needed!

Thank you in advance!

Have you tried removing the fan, applying thermal paste, then reconnecting the fan.
Going into your bios there are two settings for intel chips, one is called Speedstep and the other is C1E.

Thank you very much for your response.

I've tried the thermal paste solution, thought that it might be the problem, unfortunately not.

I went through my bios last night and I can't seem to find the specific element called Speedship, nor am I able to locate C1E.

Am I looking the wrong place, or is it something else?

Which motherboard do you use?
Is your machine overclocked?

if your fan has a four pin jack connecting to the motherboard, it means it is PWM (speed controlled by the CPUs temp). if youre confident your CPU will not overheat, replace the fan with a 3 pin fan..

The mb, thought I forgot thomething

It's a Gigabyte GA-EP35C-DS3R.

[edit] It's not overclocked as far as I know. It didn't look OC'ed when I browsed through the bios a couple of days ago.

@Chaos: Good advice, I have to figure out if I'm willing to take the 'chance'

Its probably dieing..... You can probably fine a factory replacement on ebay.

Patonb said:

Its probably dieing..... You can probably fine a factory replacement on ebay.

Click to expand...

That will be a good point. Alot of fans use ballbearings, as these ware down there will be more noise. As the noise is getting worst then it may mean the fan is going to fail.

So I should be looking for a fan upgrade.

I'll take a look around, I've used alot of Zalmans in the past, but I need to make sure that there's room for it's pretty crowded in there. Any suggestions for effective alternatives that does not eat alot of room (yeah, I know, good cooling takes space).

Thanks again y'all for your responses!

Your best option isa to update to a after market heat sink...

i often find that my cpu fan gets dusty as hell, a good clean maybe the solution, this includes removing the fan and de-dusting the heatsink as well, also helps with cooling ;-)

MrNeeds