Years ago I would not have thought it possible but it is true. Fans on budget cards these days self destruct quickly, even if never used for gaming.
Used to be that if you had a decent tiny Philips screwdriver you could take the fan off, peel the label off the bearing cavity and put a drop of thick oil in to revive it. Now a lot of them have pressed in blade assemblies with no rear bearing access.
In that case you can heat a piece of wire, melt a hole where there used to be one, take a razor knife and trim away any previously molten plastic that sits higher than the plane of the back of the fan (so it fits flush against the heatsink again), THEN put a drop of oil in.
If you wait till the fan is so worn that it's making a horrible racket it may be too late to save the fan and the above will only buy you days to weeks to figure out a replacement fan or card. If you don't wait you can perpetually relube it while cursing at the jackasses who took something that should work for a decade and made it failure prone to save less than $1.
Finally I just decided to make a few fan cards like the following, though they have to have a piece of 14 ga. or lower wire soldered on as a strut to hold them at the right height due to their weight. At least they shouldn't fail any year soon like the original fans or the similarly crappy fans they put in retail fan cards. Low RPM and dual ball bearings FTW!
Well with technology and card software they have the ability to turn the fan off except in extreme loads. Even a little fan like this could be probably be needed to run only in stressful 3D loads, which if you don't game with this it would be off most of it life. Heck, I bet this thing could be off, even while running Minecraft. Figure even as a HTPC doing video playback and encoding task it probably could make do without. If that was the case the fan would be fine well past the usable life of the card/tech.
^ In some systems I agree the fan could be off when not 3D gaming but in others things like HD decoding do cause a fair bit of heat particularly when it's a single height card and there's another card in the slot right below it.
Plus, those tiny fans barely move any air so unlike larger ones there's not a lot of RPM range they can vary the speed. If the card's getting warmer it practically has to run at 100% and still rises 10-20C or more.
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Used to be that if you had a decent tiny Philips screwdriver you could take the fan off, peel the label off the bearing cavity and put a drop of thick oil in to revive it. Now a lot of them have pressed in blade assemblies with no rear bearing access.
In that case you can heat a piece of wire, melt a hole where there used to be one, take a razor knife and trim away any previously molten plastic that sits higher than the plane of the back of the fan (so it fits flush against the heatsink again), THEN put a drop of oil in.
If you wait till the fan is so worn that it's making a horrible racket it may be too late to save the fan and the above will only buy you days to weeks to figure out a replacement fan or card. If you don't wait you can perpetually relube it while cursing at the jackasses who took something that should work for a decade and made it failure prone to save less than $1.
Finally I just decided to make a few fan cards like the following, though they have to have a piece of 14 ga. or lower wire soldered on as a strut to hold them at the right height due to their weight. At least they shouldn't fail any year soon like the original fans or the similarly crappy fans they put in retail fan cards. Low RPM and dual ball bearings FTW!
http://imgur.com/Tye2BLZ
Plus, those tiny fans barely move any air so unlike larger ones there's not a lot of RPM range they can vary the speed. If the card's getting warmer it practically has to run at 100% and still rises 10-20C or more.
Thank you!