I’m Handy!

This is another one of those “hopefully someone having the same problem comes across it and finds it useful” posts.

So my video card has taken to acting wonky, of late. Whenever I’d play a game (COD4 mainly) after a few minutes it would freeze up. My guess was that it was heat related, probably a bad fan on my SAPPHIRE Radeon X700PRO 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 Video Card. This was a great “bang for the buck” card when I bought it in August of 2005 and still fulfills my gaming needs just fine today, so I’d really rather not replace it, though I feared that would be necessary. Opening the case I find the fan barely turning at all and I know that I have my culprit.

The stock fan is a proprietary piece that I’m extremely unlikely to find a replacement for (and trust me, I looked), so I’m thinking I’m going to have to buy an third party cooling solution to replace the whole factory heatsink/fan assembly, which seems ridiculous, given the depreciated value of the card today. Before I start throwing money at this thing, I decide to see if it’s fixable. I pull the card out and find that the fan is secured to the heatsink by three very small Phillips-head screws. I get the screws out, remove the fan (which is very stiff and “draggy” and remove the sticker from the bottom covering its insides. Searching for suitable lube I decide upon Boeshield T-9. Developed by Boeing for Aerospace use, sold for cycling use, seems like just the ticket. A few drips later, the fan is spinning quite freely, so I put it all back together, reinstall it and BINGO! The temp never rises near the danger range the fan spins freely and all is (for now) well. And I can get back to the important business of “shooting melon fevers” in COD4.

The moral of this story: don’t give up on “bad” cooling fans. They can almost always be replaced, resurrected (cleaned and lubed) or “upgraded” to third party cooling solutions.