CPU Chip Fan Speed Failure or Slow

[GregMior]

For two days I've been hearing a sort of whirring noise that would go for about a second and come back about 2 seconds later. Originally I thought this was the HDD on its last legs, but I rebooted my computer to find this error message greeting me: "CPU Chip Fan failed or slow." Or something very similar to that.

First and foremost the specs:
ASUS A8N-E, Socket 939
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+
Zalman Heatsink (can't remember the exact make, but its worked over the year i've had the computer)

I have looked at every fan in my chassis and on the motherboard itself, and they all appear to be running, and running well. My temperature's (according to AIDA32) are CPU: 43C (109F) and motherboard 43C (109F). Now normally these temperatures would scare me a little, but the CPU one I can understand, because I run number crunching software (SETI and Rosetta), and when I turn this off, my CPU drops back down to 26C-28C, however, the motherboard number does not seem to budge.

I also ran a hard drive diagnostic tool and it gave me error messages that it was running too hot (48C). In my hasty diagnosis, I thought HDD, so I ordered a new one and have been backing up data, but when i saw the error message in the POST, I'm not so certain anymore. Could this just be a false error message, since all the fans seem to be working well? Could my HDD make a whirring sound?

Any advice would be appreciated.

 

[BillParrish]

Check your bios, I beleive when I was looking up something else about that board (I dont have one) I noticed a huge amount of settings related to fan speeds and fan alarms somewhere, probally in the AMD "cool and quiet" setup.


What the board is telling you is that (true or not) the board thinks your Zallman fan is running slow.

Any chance there is some wire or cable that might be hitting the fan blades but when you take the side off the wire or cable gets moved away from the zalman fan and you dont notice it ?

Just a shot. Luck.