Problem with noisy fan in tower

AbstractWool

My Dad has a problem with noisy fans in his tower. He bought the tower from Ebay earlier in the year and has been told that it may due to being 'overclocked'.

Any suggestions please?

JasX

Easiest check - Is the thing full of dust? if so clean it out (take electrostatic precautions).

Have you put it somewhere that obstructs air flow around it or is otherwise 'warm' that will make it difficult to cool itself and need the fans to run harder.

Following that you can get into looking in BIOS/freeware monitoring tools to find out exactly what processor you have, what speed its running at (standard stock speed vs overclocked) and what temperature its running at.

You can then choose to spend money
-upgrading your cooling to something more effective that'll run a little quieter
-fan controllers (of if you're lucky a setting somewhere) to reduce your fan speeds if temperatures look ok and they can be eased back a bit
-upgrading other components on the PC depending on current spec (eg multiple small hard drives will produce more heat than a single high capacity one, modern processors use a smaller silicon die size, use less power and generate less heat proportional to processing power, a large well designed metal case will disapppitate heat better than a small pokey plastic one that needs its fans to run full pelt)

-alternatively if it is overclocked (or even if it isn't) de-tune it to run slower sacrificing processing power in exchange for running cooler and generatiing less heat.

AbstractWool

Thanks for the quick reply!

How do you get into the BIOS/freeware?... talking to a novice here lol.

googler

How many fans?

I'd expect to find one on the processor itself, and possibly a case fan. Have you got any others?

AbstractWool

Two fans I think, case fan and processor. Is there a fan on the psu?

ddoris

Yes there is a fan on psu. get cpu-z -http://www.cpuid.com/downloads/cpu-z/1.55-setup-en.exe
This will simply tell you what cpu you have and what speed it's running at.
Most likely it's full of dust as already mentioned.

googler

The fan in the PSU is a given, so you can't replace that without replacing the PSU.

You can disconnect the power to the case fan and see if that's making the most noise. If everything gets quieter, then either clean it out, or replace it. Replacements are cheap from places like Maplin

You can get away with disconnecting the CPU fan for a short while to see what difference that makes to the noise. Again, if that's the culprit, clean or replace.

JasX

AbstractWool wrote: »

Thanks for the quick reply!
How do you get into the BIOS/freeware?... talking to a novice here lol.

CPU-Z is a good place to start as detailed above, not sure if it'll give you temperature info tho, if I'm not too familiar with generic ones as I tent to work out who made the motherboard/chipset and go get their tools off their website.

googler wrote: »

You can get away with disconnecting the CPU fan for a short while to see what difference that makes to the noise. Again, if that's the culprit, clean or replace.

For perspective I'd define 'short while' as under 30 secs, more only if you are able to monitor the CPU temperature and cut it off if it starts to shoot up too much

As before I'd suggest opening the side and looking for esxcessive dust as a good first option (particularly on fins of heat exchangers/coolers -don't use a vacume cleaner inside your PC pull it out by hand)

AbstractWool

Thanks a lot for all the helpful replies. Will try them today!