ATI XTASY Radeon 9100 Noisy Fan

[dvdnewbie2005]

Has anybody else run into this problem. Just bought the card off of eBay, and now my case is humming and whirring all over the place. I'm not 100% sure it's the card, but my comp. wasn't making these sounds before I installed the card. Is there anything I can do about it? Is there a way to turn off the fan on the card? If there is a way to do this, should I upgrade the fan for the case? Any help would be appreciated. Thanks!

[redwudz]

You wouldn't want to turn off the fan. You could clean it. Dust and dirt sometimes makes them noisy. Or it may be out of balance and vibrating. Then you would have to replace it with a matching fan, which may not be so easy to find.

What I have done with a non fan video card is to get a PCI slot fan that attaches with the same type of metal backplate a PCI card uses. The slot below the AGP card shouldn't generally be used anyway as it often uses a shared IRQ. I use a quiet 80mm fan on a card. You could then eliminate the video card fan, but you would still need to have a decent heatsink on the video card.

[ROF]

There are several video cards that because of their fan system they make an incredible amount of racket inside certain cases. My suggestion if you are sure it's an internal fan and not a case or P/S fan is to install some sound dampening material to the wall and floor of your tower. Any good music store or electronics shop will sell acoustical foam. You want the 1/4 inch thick stuff. Use an adhesive material to attach this to the side access panel(DO NOT BLOCK VENTS) and the floor of your tower (DO NOT ALLOW MATERIAL TO TOUCH COMPONENTS).

This will eliminate alot of noise caused inside a noisy case. If you can't find acoustical foam or you're too cheap to buy it. You could always use 1/8 inch carpet pad (the stuff they put underneath carpeting). If you visit a carpet store you can either pull pieces from their dumpster or even ask someone if you could buy just a small 2 foot square section of 1/8 inch padding. They'll usually direct you to the dumpster or cut you a small piece such as that for nothing.