Computer Sounds Like a Boat

[AngryPig]

My friends computer randomly makes this very loud noise similar to a boat motor. It can happen during gaming or just regular emails and YouTube. I tried FurMark and Prime95 at the same time and could not reproduce the noise under heavy load. I also tried Crystal Disk Mark incase the hard drive was wonky but no luck there either. The only thing of note is it appears the GPU fans don't all turn on under a light load (0 at idle, 1 under some load and 3 at full load) but this may just be normal on newer cards(?).

 

I have told them if it happens again to try gently stop each fan to see if it is caused by one of them but I am a bit stumped at what could be causing it. Any suggestions?

[bezza...]

check that none of the fans are being interfeird  by anything

[tkitch]

yes, 0RPM GPU fans are a normal thing now, that's not an issue.  

 

It's possible a fan is rubbing against something.  Can you take off the front panel and test? 

[emosun]

sounds like a dead bearing on one of the fans probably a case fan or psu fan

[AngryPig]

3 minutes ago, Tomberry said:

check that none of the fans are being interfeird  by anything

  

1 minute ago, tkitch said:

yes, 0RPM GPU fans are a normal thing now, that's not an issue.  

 

It's possible a fan is rubbing against something.  Can you take off the front panel and test? 

 

From the videos they have sent they appear to be unobstructed but if there was something there I would expect it to be a constant noise?

[bezza...]

Just now, AngryPig said:

From the videos they have sent they appear to be unobstructed but if there was something there I would expect it to be a constant noise?

yh i thought this 2 but i cant think of what else it could be

[AngryPig]

2 minutes ago, emosun said:

sounds like a dead bearing on one of the fans probably a case fan or psu fan

I forgot about the PSU fan so will check it as well thanks. Would a dead bearing be intermittent noise though? 

[flibberdipper]

5 minutes ago, AngryPig said:

I forgot about the PSU fan so will check it as well thanks. Would a dead bearing be intermittent noise though? 

They can be. The fact that we can't see any of the fans in the video slow down when the boat clearly is also points me to the PSU fan either being wonky or having something shoved up into it. Depending what PSU they have, it also probably has a 0RPM mode but if it's anything like the RM750x in my server, it'll kick on periodically even when it's only dealing with 60-90 watts of load.

 

Sidenote, kind of funny that the full ATX unit does that yet the SFF EVGA unit in my normal PC only starts kicking at ~140-150w. Computers are funny lol