Fan Failure, ball bearings?

[schlitzbull]

Hello!

Just noticed my cpu temps were high and found the fans on my x61 weren't spinning. I verified the connections are ok and ended up figuring out of I gently help them start spinning they will eventually take off. When the fans stop it's not smooth. Almost like it finds a notch in a gear and stops (exaggerated example). If I move my case around I can hear a bit of a rattle in them. I checked to make sure there wasn't anything touching the fans as well.

This is my first fan failure. I've briefly checked Google and most point a ball bearing failure to a grinding noise. I find it odd they would both fail at the same time but I suppose it's possible ive been running on one fan for a while. Kraken was installed in October.

I did have to put the cpu cooler on a chassis fan slot initially on my hero alpha board. Is it possibly it was overdriving the fans? Any suggestions on fan replacements are welcome.

 

[Brian_B]

Sounds like low voltage or bad DC motor. Make sure the fan header they are plugged into is working correctly - try plugging them straight into a molex or something.

It could be bad bearings, but you are right, the odds of both of them going at the exact same time is pretty low.

No, a chassis fan slot isn't really any different than the CPU fan slot, or any other fan slot; other than it has a different name. Pretty much every PC fan should work at 100% speed if you put it straight to 12VDC without any harm to anything.

 

[schlitzbull]

I did try multiple fan headers. I tried another chassis fan and reconnected to the cpu fan header and I got the same results. I also tried multiple sata power connections with no change.

Any idea on how to determine if it's a low voltage issue or just a bad motor in both? What would cause the failure? Just seems odd to have the failure after 6 months with no hardware changes/bios changes. Thanks for the reply.

Edit: I let it running through dinner. Came back up and booted it down, let all the fans spin down. Turned it back on and the fans came up ok. This is with the front cover off but I doubt that makes a difference. Repeated again and it seems ok. Will continue to monitor. Thanks again for the response! very weird....

Edit 2: Im really curious what happened here. The only voltage changes I had done was adjusting my GPU voltage in precision X (2x1080s pushed to 120% power). Played for a while and didn't have any issues. I came back and noticed my PC was in sleep mode (wtf I disabled that when I first installed windows). Adjust my power settings then notice my overclock was dialed down to 4.6Ghz. Re-ran the asus suite overclocking tool (same as originally...just tried it to see if it the software would work as it did for almost 6mo/dont judge me) and got a 4.4GHz overclock with a boost disabled this time? Came back the next day and rebooted to go ahead and manually set everything and noticed the fans weren't spinning. Reset bios to factory defaults, fans still not spinning. Help the fans along and get booted into windows and let it run for about 30 minutes. Reboot and manually configure my overclock. No problems now...PSU is a 850 G2.