A Busted Case Fan

A week or two ago I was tooling around with my BIOS to try to find if I could activate Wake-on-LAN in there somehow (I couldn't... stay tuned), and I noticed that my CPU (AMD Athlon 64 3000+) was running abnormally hot, around 59 degrees celsius. Not terrible, but warmer than I remember it being, which is a lot cooler than the Athlon XP I had in there back in 2003.

Anyway, I knew it wasn't too too hot, and the computer was running fine otherwise, so I left it alone.

This morning I realized that my case fan had broken. It was a stock fan that came with a dinky Powmax tower case that I bought during college, made of the flimsiest metal you could imagine. But the fan worked well and lit up magenta and blue, so when I bought my new and awesome ULTRA case, I kept the fan (the new case didn't come with one).

I checked the connections and saw that it was good (I didn't notice it had broken because the LED's still lit up), but the plastic casing around the motor itself had cracked at some point, and while the motor still turned if I held it tighter together, it was slow and didn't move air at all. Time for a new one.

I went to Best Buy ready to plunk down around 10-15 dollars for a case fan, and when I got there, the two LED-lit fans were both around 12.50-12.99. But as I looked down, I saw a generic Dynex-brand case fan that was only 1.99! Only caveat is that it didn't light up. But for 1/6th the price, I couldn't resist. Armed with my 12% off coupon (hurry, coupon expires Jan 21st!) that I got from recently discovered Dealigg, as well as my Best Buy rewards card, I was able to get the price reduced to $1.92 including tax. Not bad!

Installing the fan was a snap like it always has, just unscrew the mounts of the old one, unplug it from the power supply, and then put the new one in its place. I'm happy to report that the average temperature is now a very pleasingly average 47 degrees celsius.

I must admit I do miss the red and blue light from my PC; it feels so much less alive now... oh well, if I really miss it, I'll just buy one for 5 dollars on eBay, and put the unlit fan in the front of the case, and it would've still been cheaper than buying that 12 dollar one at the store :).

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