LeadTek Geforce2 64 mb GTS Fan failure Replace or modify?

Upon doing some routine maintenace, I noticed my Leadtek Geforce fan took a dump on me. It is hard to turn by hand, and it certainly won't under power.
The card is only 9 months old. I have contacted both Leadtek and the place I purchased the card from. I have no doubt I will be receiving a new fan as it is still under warrantee.

After reading articles on Over-clockers.com, I am very intersted in tossing the original fan for a more efficient fan, prefferably a ball bearing one, and maybe some better heat sinks.

Anyone have some ideas?
I also am interested in overclocking this bad boy. I would appreciate any suggestions there as well.

Im running an Asus A7V Motherboard.
1.1 Gig Athalon T-Bird.
512K Ram

Thank you.

The fan on my MSI GTS did the same thing- only took 2 weeks for mine to die, though!

I ran it fanless for a while, and was still able to up the core from 200 to 225 with no problems. Attached a sink from an old Celeron CPU, and now it cranks to 250.

The easiest thing to do is simply to replace the fan with a better one. Almost any fan at all is better than the included one- try Radio Shack for some ideas.

Swapping the stock fan for a Blue Orb cooler is very popular and easy also. Beware- Blue Orbs are notorious for being of widely varied build quality- sometimes the patch where it contacts your video card is not at all flat, and you'll have to sand it flat before it will do any good.

Use your imagination- almost any fan\heatsink will do the job on a vid card. Especially since the core doesn't really give you any extra speed when overclocked. The speed boost comes from overclocking the card's memory, and memory works differently from the core- keeping it cool doesn't increase it's OC-ablility. Memory's top speed is determined by the manufacturing process, not it's temperature.

If I were you, I'd just glue a 60MM fan on your card and have done with it. Maybe hook on a bigger heatsink too, like from a 486 CPU or something.

Vid cards are fun to work on; they are very tolerant of poor cooling- you get to stick all sortd of stuff to them without worrying about frying them!!

Good Luck!

You might want to checkout these alternatives for Video HSF's;
http://2cooltek.safeshopper.com/51/177.htm?710[/URL]

THANKS ALL! VERY HELPFUL!!

Guess I'm off to my parts box...