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Why would a fan just stop working???

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samkhadra

Member
Joined
Aug 15, 2003
Location
South East London (UK)
I was at my friends house today and I turned on his PC he said wanted my old Nvidia graphics card, so I brought that over to install it. I pressed the button to start the PC before I Installed it and it was quiet I mean it was loading everything fine but I mean it was really quite, normally its quite loud. So I didn't really figure out anything at the time so After I installed it I turned on the PC and went into the BIOS settings to see if he could overclock his cpu a little bit from 700mhz to 933mhz, so I went to check the temps before I did it and I saw that the cpu was at 79 Degrees check the fans rpm and it said 0. So I thoughts thats strange looked into the PC and the fan obviously wasn't spinning at all.

Can anyone explain why that would happen?

P.S. I gave him my old stock fan for my 1.2GHz Duron and that worked! Temps at 45-49 Degrees!
 
I have had this happen when running Mother Board Monitor and Hardware doctor at the same time. My CPU fan would just stop.

I stopped running both at the same time and never had a problem since.
 
If he is looking at the bios fan speed, then the software monitor wouldn't matter. If he opened the case and saw that it wasn't spinning then the fan is dead. I would think that a fan would die from the bearings dying (usually makes a buzzing noise when the bearings are going). Thats what my guess would be, but who knows. IT was dead and now is replaced. All good now.
 
heres a lil advantage ball bearing fans have over sleeve bearing ones, when a ball bearing dies, it gets bloody noisy, and slows down signifficantly, but still moves air, on the other hand when a sleeve bearing dies it just stops... no nothing
sleeve bearing arent all that bad tho, theyre quieter than ball bearings.

so i bet your friends fan (if it was a stock one then this most likely is the prob) problem was that it was a sleeve bearing and... well... it umm... died
 
Not necesarily relevant to this, but somewhat interesting: Sometimes when the fan is off, and it is rotated in exactly the right position, it won't turn when it comes back on, and it needs a little push with the finger. This is probably only an issue with old or cheap or small fans that must have only two coils. Most fans I've looked at have 4 coils, but this one 50mm fan I have does this. Maybe it only has 2.
 
squeakygeek said:
Not necesarily relevant to this, but somewhat interesting: Sometimes when the fan is off, and it is rotated in exactly the right position, it won't turn when it comes back on, and it needs a little push with the finger. This is probably only an issue with old or cheap or small fans that must have only two coils. Most fans I've looked at have 4 coils, but this one 50mm fan I have does this. Maybe it only has 2.

This has happened a lot with TMD fans as well. In any case, if you have to jump start your fan, its time to look into a new one!
 
Once I was messing around with my setup, not sure what I was doing, but all of a sudden my brand new smartfan II wouldn't spin, even after giving it a boost or "jump start". I tried a few things that didn't work, then, I unplugged the potentiometer, plugged it back in, and it worked again. I never did figure that one out.
 
Well I took his fan to check it and I found that it was 4 coil one, but as I gave him a replacement I said let me go further in and I think it just died, in fact some cables that were soldered had came off. So it has basically DIED!
 
Well, the fan contains some electronics to drive the coils one by one in order to spin the fan. Those are tiiiny electric thingies. Being tiny usually makes them sensitive. The fan is placed in an environment where it's hot and cold. Below the fan is a deadzone of heat.

So.. we have electronics not exactly made for NASA specs...
....placed in an environment with thermic cycling...
.... built by the lowest bidder....

..why shouldn't the fans electronic circuitry go dead on some speciments?
 
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