Fans fail, but what are the symptoms of fan failure
and the sources of fan failure?
Let's talk to Wes at the bench.
Wes, good to see you again.
You too, Zack.
It's always great to be at the bench with you, sir.
All right. It's great to be here.
It's always fun to work with the hardware
and help people out if I can.
And you do help people out too, I must say.
Okay, so I come to you with this issue here.
The symptoms and the sources of fan failure.
So the symptoms of fan failure.
What are we looking at?
Well, overheating, really without visual inspection,
dust build buildup, component failure, fan failure in this case,
they will manifest themselves in the same symptoms.
And that usually manifests itself
in overheating in the system itself.
Maybe you've put your hand on the case,
the desktop case and you're like, “Wow, that's kind of hot.”
I was frying an egg.
Okay, well, it's probably because you left it out
in the Florida sun at noon.
So yeah, that is definitely one of the telltale signs
of the fact that it's getting hot, it's starting to overheat,
those random system reboots if it gets too hot.
The other thing, too, is a lot of noise.
And the reason I say that is because your firmware platform,
when you have multiple system fans
and a CPU fan in your system unit,
what I mean by that, jargon aside, is just to collectively,
what is the box that I can walk away with
and I plug everything into?
That's your system unit.
When you have multiple fans,
then they kind of work in tandem, they work together.
When we looked at the dust buildup episode,
we've seen that heat sink, it was a metal.
And we'll look at it again, for sure here.
But that's part of your cooling system.
And then there's a fan that is attached to that heat sink.
And what it does is as that block of metal absorbs or dissipates,
pulls that heat from the CPU into itself,
then the fan is supposed to blow that hot air out.
And then in combination with the system fans,
the case fans, they're strategically positioned
with the vents to pull cool air into the case.
And then as the heat gets generated in the case,
the exhaust fan is supposed to push or pull,
depending on how your frame of reference is,
as opposed to basically exhaust
that hot air out of the back of the case.
And if one of those fans fails,
then what can happen is your firmware
has the ability to adjust the voltages.
Not all fans, but the fans a lot of times
that are connected directly to the motherboard,
your firmware, your BIOS, you EFI,
more modern firmware platform will look at that
or will detect that through a thermal temperature sensor
and say, “Wait a second, something's going on here.
Let's apply more voltage to the fan
and let's start to speed it up.”
And that manifests itself in the noise.
If you've ever had a computer that's overheating
and you ever heard that those fans,
it sounds like a helicopter lifting off.
It sounds like a Cuisinart.
Yeah, I have to be fair, though, because it could be dust.
But in this case, we're just tackling it from the standpoint
that one of the fans has failed
so that all the other fans have to compensate
to make up for the loss of air that's being pulled
or pushed by the fan that's failed.
So if you have multiple fans in your PC, most people do,
one fan goes bad, you shouldn't just think,
well, it'll be fine, because other fans are working.
Well, it depends on how your case is built.
And what I mean by that is when I built…
one of the builds that I did,
I had like three or four case fans,
which meant I know I had one in the front, one in the back.
I had four, two sidewall,
two on the sides as well as the CPU fan.
So in that case, if it's one of the smaller,
let's say, 80mm fans and it fails,
then you're probably OK for a little bit,
at least enough to definitely replace it.
Run to the store and buy another one.
Yeah, exactly.
Definitely, get on the phone,
get on the line, get you one coming in.
And that's the great thing about having redundant fans.
If one fails, the others can compensate for a while.
Again, sometimes the BIOS will push more voltage to them
and it'll make them a little bit louder.
However, keep in mind that also shortens their life too,
because if one's going faster,
then the bearings are getting worn.
Again, it's a moving part,
any kind of mechanical moving part is bound to fail.
So what you can do is you can overtax the other fans
and then slowly they can start to fail.
However, I will tell you that for the most part,
fans do a really good job, and a lot of times they don't fail.
But you never say never
because I have seen some that have just stopped working,
And that's what we're talking about it right now.
So what are the causes of fan failure?
Well, the causes, there's a couple of things.
One of the things could be
just outright the fan has failed itself, that happens.
Another thing could be loose connections.
And if it's a loose connection, then what's going to happen
is that if it's not firmly seated on the motherboard,
maybe you've upgraded a component,
maybe you've changed a component,
then it's not registering in the BIOS and the BIOS can't see it.
So the BIOS, according to its perspective,
says, “It's not here, something's wrong.”
Let me show you what I mean.
We've pulled up the BIOS interface here and you can kind of see.
You'll have to check with your manufacturer
on how you get into the BIOS interface,
what I really like about this BIOS interface here,
this is an AMI BIOS, and again,
the brand of the motherboard is by Gigabyte.
And this is in their easy mode,
but you can see that we have three system fans here.
I’ve got a CPU fan and two system fans.
But notice that there's a fourth fan.
All right, this is what it would look like
if the fan has failed and it's not being seen,
- or if there's a loose connection. - Oh, you forced that.
Yeah, in full disclosure here, transparency,
there isn't a fan currently connected to this header
on the motherboard, and that's what it would look like.
Now, if a fan is connected to the motherboard,
there are other things, other symptoms as well
that I wanted to show you here.
So if we click on any one of these fans,
it takes us into this nice little graph
and it shows you that PWM,
it stands for pulse width modulation.
In fact, that's just a fancy term for
hey, we hit it with more voltage
and look at the performance, it makes it run faster, right?
And we can see that we could set speed fan controls and stuff,
we could fan stop if we want.
But look at this one right here, the fan fail warning.
I don't have this enabled and honestly,
I'm not going to enable this on a fan that doesn't exist
because if it's not connected, then according to the BIOS,
it says, “Hey, if that fan isn't detected,
you told me that I should let you know
and it'll set off an audible alarm.”
- Oh, really? - Yeah.
Well, but that's another sign that we can see
when you see the CPU voltages,
this CPU voltage and the system temp,
they're all within the tolerances here.
Your PCH, that's what's known as the platform controller hub.
It's like another processor that's really built into the board.
I think of it as like the traffic controller at an airport,
it basically monitors and controls
the exchange of communications across the motherboard.
It can get fairly hot,
but it's well within its operational range here.
And if we were out of the tolerance zone or the tolerances,
it would indicate that here?
It would.
So for instance, your VRM MOS,
that's again, fancy bunch of alphabet soup here?
That's voltage regulator module.
What that means is that this is a crucial set of capacitors
that are semi-oxide metal or, excuse me, hold on,
metal oxide semiconductors is that stands for.
But some conductors on the motherboard that are…
they make sure that the power is where it needs to be,
and because power is going through it
and they're regulating the power, they can get very hot too.
So if you start to see these temperatures rise,
especially in relation to the fact
that a CPU fan isn't being seen,
then we know we've got an issue.
And at this point, what we need to do
is we need to identify what the failed fan is,
and then we need to go ahead and replace it.
Well, then that comes to our last point,
which is what is the solution?
Well, the solution in this case.
- Replace it. - It really is.
We've seen part of the solution here
is looking at what we did and looking at the BIOS
and finding out, “Hey, we're not seeing the fan
and those temperature ranges
are out of their normal operating values.”
Now, operational values are going to vary
from motherboard to motherboard,
from CPU to CPU, from case to case.
In the words of one of the other Edutainers here
at ITProTV, this isn't a one-size-fits-all,
it's a one-size-fits-one,
so check on the vendor manufacturer
and check out what the operating specifications are.
But I guess what we'll go ahead and do
is if we've identified the fan that's failed,
what do you say we go ahead
and show you how to replace the fan.
I think that'd be great.
- All right. - TV time out, maybe?
Yeah, that's what we'll do.
We'll go ahead and we'll clear off our keyboards here,
we'll turn our computer off, we'll put it up on the bench,
and what do you say we come back,
we'll do a little bit of component replacement.
Let's go.
- And we're back. - That's right.
So now we're talking about the solution to our fan failure.
That's right.
So what we need to do is identify the fan that's failed.
In this case, I'm going to show you the rear system fan,
one of the system fans has failed.
It's this one right here.
And what we're going to do
is we're going to go ahead and replace it.
You can see that we have our other fan here.
And one of the things I would mention
is just pay attention to your fans here
because they'll tell you with little arrows on them
and you can just barely see that arrow through there.
It lets you know the direction, the rotational spin of the fan,
and the direction that it pulls or pushes the air.
In this case, this arrow is pointing that way,
and it's letting me know
that this is going to push air this way.
So in this case, air is coming in from the front
and it's going to go out the back,
so I need to make sure that the arrow,
the directional arrow, is actually facing back.
So what we're going to go ahead and do
is I'm going to remove this fan.
And I've kind of gone ahead
and I've backed off the bolts a little bit there.
But if we could take a view here,
you can see we've got four mounting positions here,
four little screws, and this one,
I went ahead and already took out ahead of time.
And to do this, it's fairly easy.
It's just a matter of backing these screws out,
and you've got to be careful
because I know what'll happen with me.
I'm so grateful that we'll end up losing one of these,
and it'll be on the other side of the studio.
You went to the school for the graceful.
That's right.
I compensate for being born with two left hands, if you will.
So, Wes, if you put the van in, let's see, the other way,
so it's not blowing out this way,
it's blowing back in that way, that would be not a good thing.
That'd be a problem, yeah.
Because what's happening is then
you're just you're pulling cool air in from both sides,
it's heating up and it's not going anywhere.
So that would cause thermal damage,
that would cause an overheating issue.
So which by association, you could say
that could be the issue, too,
if you're replacing one of these
and you replace them wrong.
So let's go ahead and if we look overhead here,
I'm just going to pull this fan just to the side here.
But then if we zoom in, you're going to notice
and I can give us a little bit more space here.
And let me grab my little pointer
and make it a little bit easier to see.
There's actually a small fan header right there
and the power cord is right there.
And basically what I did is I just disconnect this off
and you pull this out, and that's really it.
We're going to pull this fan out
and what we're going to do
is we're going to take the next fan
and we're going to basically put it in its place.
Now, I will say some of the things
that I'm going to do off-camera here is
a little bit of cable management because of the fact that
this fan has such a long cable, it's really close.
What I'll end up doing is I'll end up making sure
that this is routed properly,
and then I'll take some of this excess
and kind of tie it down with the little zip ties.
Because you don't want that cable to get caught in the family.
Yeah, if the cable is not quite as long as this one is,
there's been times where I've done little knots like this
and what it'll do is it'll take some of the excess,
that's not going to work in this case here.
So, what we're going to do is we're going to position this
and again, remembering that this fan
needs to blow out of the back of the case.
And if we look overhead here real quick,
I'll show you that the one thing that I want to do
is I want to make sure that you'll see
that the cable itself is down here towards the bottom,
and that is going to help us snug this.
And also keep sure you can see that cable there.
I want it closer to where the system header is
or the fan header is, that little four pins right there.
So I want this cable closer to that
just again for proper routing techniques.
And then if we look at the tech cam,
it's really just going to be lining up these bolts
and I'll go ahead and get them started here.
And then what we'll do is once we've got these started,
we'll go ahead and lock them down.
Again, just pay attention to your motherboard manufacturer,
the case manufacturer here again,
and just kind of be patient with it.
You can see they're kind of falling out on me here.
You're working at a strange angle.
I was going to say that's kind of par for the course here, though.
So I'll go ahead and tell you what,
we'll get these started here
and make sure that they don't fall out.
If you're installing the screws for the first time
because this is a plastic, you might see that it's…
because for the most part, they're universal,
but I will tell you some things that sometimes happen
is they don't like to thread really easy.
Make sure that you're not cross-threading them.
Sometimes you'll see
that you'll have little plastic shavings and stuff.
But if you're not cross-threading, it's okay.
You can kind of hear this one is more like a ratchet set.
This is part of my Dinex kit,
so you can absolutely love this little thing,
especially when you need to turn these
and you need to do a lot of this.
In tight quarters too.
Yeah, so I'm pretty sure
you've probably used a screwdriver once or twice.
So again, nothing too challenging here.
The main thing to just remember when you're installing these,
just make sure that the rotational spin and the direction
is appropriate for your case.
So, if we look out, kind of zoom out a little bit
and we look at from the top,
essentially, that's what we have here.
We've got our fan is installed and then at this point,
it's really just taking this four-pin header
and just plugging that into the little four-pin header
that we've seen on the motherboard.
So I'm going to go ahead
and I'm going to try to wrestle with this
and notice that I do have my ESD wrist strap on.
Yeah, that's smart.
It is very, very important for you to maintain proper protection.
We'll set our light off to the side here
so that I can get in here. Thank you.
And we will plug that in.
And once that's done,
well, our fan is pretty much connected.
Now at this point,
what we need to do is I need to do
a little bit of cable management on it,
make sure that with rotational moving parts and stuff,
you don't want these cables getting caught up in here.
But then it's just a matter of putting your case back together
and like we showed you in the BIOS interface that we were at,
it's just making sure that the systems detected it
and you've got RPMs and there you go.
It's as simple as that to replace a system fan.
Wonderful.
So you've helped us identify the symptoms
and the sources of fan failure
- and what we can do to fix that. - That's right.
Thanks again, Wes.
You're welcome.