Friday, September 14, 2007
The death of a motherboard (chipset)
Warning: This blog entry contains technical details of PC's which may leave some people bored and baffled.
I'm a bit of a PC enthusiast to quite an extent so I have to admit I spent a fair wad of my cash on upgrading my PCs now and then, and can it drive my family near to madness every time I purchase something (mostly because of the inevitable delivery of many parcels!). But this time I'm kind of in need of proper genuine replacement.
The motherboard for my PCI-Express (OK going to get into technical terms here!) system had annoyingly loud and distracting chipset fan mounted on it. At first I thought it was the graphics card I had at the time which noisied up when it was playing games (which I guess fans kick in when it runs hot, but gfx cards don't really run that noisily). But after a while with different components the same noise presented itself. And it was only until recently I realised it was in fact the chipset fan on my board which was the noisy mother making all the fuss. I've also looked up my Asus board on the internet and various users have had the same problem with this fan do I really need to listen to a suprisingly small fan make a loud whirring racket or noise like a small jet taking off when I play a game? Don't think so. So I tried to replace the fan with a heatsink (which is a silent cooling solution which Asus should take note and install on all their boards!) but it wouldn't fit properly as my graphics card was too big and would interfere with the positioning of the heatsink. Sooooooooo, I plugged in the old Asus noisy beast and to my limited surprise had gone dead.
So I've now ordered a new board, an Asrock one, which doesn't have a chipset fan on it but a proper heatsink. Word to the wise: Do not buy a motherboard with a chipset fan installed, cos it will keep you distracted all hours of the day (if you play games that is).
As a footnote to my problem here's an amusing web page I found on which some guy describes the same problem I had with a similar board:
http://digital-lifestyles.info/2007/03/29/driven-mad-by-a-whining-asus-fan/
I'm a bit of a PC enthusiast to quite an extent so I have to admit I spent a fair wad of my cash on upgrading my PCs now and then, and can it drive my family near to madness every time I purchase something (mostly because of the inevitable delivery of many parcels!). But this time I'm kind of in need of proper genuine replacement.
The motherboard for my PCI-Express (OK going to get into technical terms here!) system had annoyingly loud and distracting chipset fan mounted on it. At first I thought it was the graphics card I had at the time which noisied up when it was playing games (which I guess fans kick in when it runs hot, but gfx cards don't really run that noisily). But after a while with different components the same noise presented itself. And it was only until recently I realised it was in fact the chipset fan on my board which was the noisy mother making all the fuss. I've also looked up my Asus board on the internet and various users have had the same problem with this fan do I really need to listen to a suprisingly small fan make a loud whirring racket or noise like a small jet taking off when I play a game? Don't think so. So I tried to replace the fan with a heatsink (which is a silent cooling solution which Asus should take note and install on all their boards!) but it wouldn't fit properly as my graphics card was too big and would interfere with the positioning of the heatsink. Sooooooooo, I plugged in the old Asus noisy beast and to my limited surprise had gone dead.
So I've now ordered a new board, an Asrock one, which doesn't have a chipset fan on it but a proper heatsink. Word to the wise: Do not buy a motherboard with a chipset fan installed, cos it will keep you distracted all hours of the day (if you play games that is).
As a footnote to my problem here's an amusing web page I found on which some guy describes the same problem I had with a similar board:
http://digital-lifestyles.info/2007/03/29/driven-mad-by-a-whining-asus-fan/
# posted by kenny @ 10:20 pm 
