My PC fan is making some weird noise

Patrick4 · September 28, 2015

Hey Guys, Long time lurker first time poster here. I have been having some issue with my cpu recently. It seems to be running in overdrive or something, i cant figure it out. I use my PC mainly for gaming (Dota, CS and such nothing very high end) and I haven't noticed any drop in performance except that the fan makes a fairly loud noise while spinning. I am not sure what the issue is here and I have noticed that if I close down all the applications the fan seems to calm down, so does restarting my PC. I opened my cabinet and did some basic dusting and cleaning, but that did not fix the issue. The PC is about 18 months old and here are some info I was able to collect from CUPID HWMonitor

http://imgur.com/xaL4JLa

http://imgur.com/BI9MHMP

Sometimes the processor (i7 4770) temperature peaks at upto 90 degree C, and averages at 65-70 degree C. Could this be the reason for the fan going crazy? If so, what should I do.. Do I need to get new parts and such? Which ones?

PS: I have not done or attempted overclocking of any kind. The only time i open my cabinet once every few months is to clean the dust off the top.

Thanks.

Mattyd7829 · September 28, 2015

I would look at maybe replacing the thermal paste on your cpu, and maybe relocating your SSD, it seems to be very very hot. ARe you using a stock cooler? I would suggest a complete strip down, clean and rebuild then maybe a better cpu cooler

crystal6tak · September 28, 2015

I can think of some reasons for this problem.

A ) The thermal paste is drying up.

Given that you don't know what specification your build has, I'm going to assume it's a pre-build. So they may have cheap out on the thermal paste and now it is drying up and causing heat issues. To fix this, acquire thermal paste, rubbing alcohol, and coffee filter/high quality napkin/tissue (something you're ok with using once and throwing away as it won't be usable again after this). Take off the CPU cooler, dump a bit of alcohol on the filter/napkin/tissue and clean off the dried up thermal paste on the CPU and the heatsink. Reapply thermal paste and put the CPU cooler back on. Here's a nice video Linus made.

B ) The fan is dying.

Not much you can do about this except getting a new fan. Check your CPU cooler and see what fan size it's using and whether or not it's replaceable. The fan size there is is 80mm ,120mm , and 240mm. If the fan is replaceable, simply buy a new fan according to the size and replace it. A good recommendation for fan is Noctua. If it is not replaceable, you can ghetto hook on a new replacement fan or buy a new CPU cooler. Hyper 212 and Noctua NHD-15 are good recommendations.