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Replacing the heatsink fan on a Sapphire 6850

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WoodenKiwi

Member
Joined
Mar 26, 2012
Location
Rochester NY
So my HSF seems to be making a ton of noise once it gets going, this started maybe two hours ago or so. I know this means the fan is either on its way out or needs cleaning, and I kinda don't feel like exploring either possibility with how much of a pain fan dis-assembly is. Can I just get like a small PWM case fan and sub it in for the original? Or is that too crude to work? I've heard of people pulling the fan and outer cover and just affixing a case fan and setting it to max, but I'd rather keep the cover and the ability for the GPU to self -regulate temp.

Anyone have any advice?
 
it's not very hard to take off a GPU fan/shroud/heatsink

4 screws, and then some that hold the fan/shroud/heatsink and the wire together

Simple. Use a toothbrush and a vacuum cleaner, and you can get it spotless
 
Oh I was talking about dis-assembling the fan itself, not the shroud and so on, but I guess its worth trying to clean it.
 
UPDATE:
Fan is dead, no question.

Found an identical replacement on ebay for like $20, in the meantime, I took a 70mm cpu cooler fan from my old and useless Athlon II OEM heatsink, spliced the PWM into the smaller GPU PWM connector, and wired it to the GPU heatsink with some steel wire, all seems to be working well :D
 
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