Fans still noisy after clean out

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I've got a gaming tower running an i7 4770k and GTX 760 GPU in a good sized, well ventilated case (not stuck in a cupboard, it's sat on an open cradle under my desk). The fans have been getting annoyingly noisy, spooling up and down for no reason when doing general browsing. There is no clutter on the machine and I run it pretty minimalist without any resource chomping browser search bar add-ons or any of that crap. I expect to hear the fans spool up a little when stuff like svchost.exe is doing its stuff and they go up a couple of notches when I'm playing Minecraft in full screen as you would expect, but they've been getting beyond the point of being acceptable noise levels.

I ran RealTemp to check my temps as first port of call but they're completely acceptable at 35-40C with just general browsing, rising to high 50s, low 60s when playing Minecraft in full screen so no heat issues.

I decided to give it a clean out and got myself a can of compressed air and fired up the vac. It was pretty bad inside with the both the CPU and GPU fans being pretty clogged up with dust and fluff. Gave it a really good clean up and it's now minty clean inside but apart from Minecraft now peaking at 55C instead of 60C there's been no noticeable difference in the fan speeds and the constant whining as they spool up and down is doing my nut in.

The board is a Gigabyte Z87-D3HP-CF and it's running W8.1.

Any suggestions chaps?

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GrumpyTwig said:

Replace fans, they have a life time.

2 years?!

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I'm trying to check for any BIOS updates first but I can't update it. I've installed the utility package from the mobo CD and gone to the BIOS update section where it asks you to choose a server to live update from. All 5 servers return a 500 server error. The next step is choosing the mobo model number but it doesn't get that far because of the server error. It says my current BIOS version is Z87 D3HP F7. Can anyone tell me if that's the most recent one for my Z87-D3HP-CF please?

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OK I think I'm making some progress here. I've found Easy Tune in the utility package and been playing around in the Smart Fan tab. I did the fan calibration and then tried the silent, standard and extreme settings to see the difference and settled on the silent setting. That worked briefly but then I heard the fan whining again. It's not noisy from running fast, it's noisy because the speed it's running seems to be creating a bit of a resonance with something and it's a really annoying low whine noise. I've now gone into the advanced fan settings tab where you can move the sliders to set the points where they spool up. I've identified the troublesome one as being the "CPU FAN & OPT". By default it hovers around the 580-590rpm mark and the noise whining noise drives me crazy. I've flat lined the graph for the fan duty cycle % to be 30.2 across the board from 0 to 60C and now the rpm sits at about 450rpm and it's quiet as a mouse now. I have the line then rising from 60C to 100% duty cycle at 80C and above. Can the experts here let me know if that will be safe to run with? I've left the duty cycles default for system fans 1/2/3.

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Hanslow said:

Looks to be the latest from the Gigabyte website. How old is the machine? When you say the fans are noisy, is it a grinding bearing type noise or the noise of them ramping up RPM? If the latter, and your machine is oldish, it could be that your thermal interface material has dried out to the point where it's losing conductivity between CPU and heatsink, assuming it's CPU and not GPU/case fans.

If you're undaunted by PC builds and maintenance, purchase some new TIM, remove the heatsink, clean the old stuff off and replace with new.

Thanks. It's not noisy in the true sense of the word, it's just a constant low pitched whine like a resonance at around 580-590rpm which is nothing. Machine is about 3 years old now I'd say. As you can see in my response above I think I've solved it by adjusting the fan speed cycle a little. Hopefully my adjustments are OK and won't cause any reliability issues! It's only a minor adjustment on the base line so I think it should be okay and temps aren't changing - still hovering around 23-24C for CPU and system with a bunch of tabs open and some HD video running so that's well within tolerance.

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chris285 said:

As stated sounds like you have resolved it, and your pc would probably shut down rather than cause damage with thermal issues unless disabled in the BIOS

I have a similar issue with my desktop as I run a corsair h100i cooler with a asus z170 motherboard, and the fans will speed up when just opening a folder or program at times which is annoying.

Same here and agree, it quickly gets annoying especially when you're working in a really quiet environment.

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chris285 said:

I also went from a quiet case with sound deadening material, to a high airflow case which i don't think has helped and like you say a quiet environment does make it more noticeable

Yeah it does. I've noticed that despite clicking 'apply' to save the settings it only saves them for the current "session". If you reboot it then it goes back to the old fan settings. I have however since discovered in the settings that there's a checkbox to always use your settings after a reboot. I've done that and it now maintains them.