Video Card Dead Fan Repair Guide
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2018-05-06
·
1,470 words · ~7 min read
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first there's the rattling then the squealing and then
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there's the embarrassment about your poor performance
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these are all symptoms of driving my car
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just kidding sort of but
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they are also symptoms of a broken GPU
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cooler and we're going to show you guys the red green way to fix it
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hp's new omen x line up comes equipped with Intel's seventh generation core i7
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processor check it out at the link in the video description
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we'll be attempting to fix broken fans on both a rear exhaust blower style GPU
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and an open cooler style GPU with our
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samples being this gtx titan x and this
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ASUS gtx 1070. both of them are actually working just
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fine by the way they was just in the wrong place at the
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wrong time if you've ever tried to do something
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like this you've probably noticed that replacement parts for video card coolers
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pretty much aren't a thing even for extremely common ones like NVIDIA's
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reference heatsink so we're gonna take a basic
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off-the-shelf reasonably high static pressure fan and
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examine how close we can get to the original one's performance
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but first a disclaimer doing basically
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anything we're about to show you will void the warranty of your GPU if you
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pull out one of these you're basically done
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this guide is really intended for the graphics card that's
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a couple years old now but is still performing well enough that you don't
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want to upgrade yet if you still have an active warranty
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get the manufacturer to fix it for you instead
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okay then so with that out of the way the exact tools that you'll need for
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this job depend a little bit on what kind of GPU you have some of them can be
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fully disassembled with just a small phillips head screwdriver while others
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will require a full ifixit kit or similar
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we also recommend though having a magnetic parts tray
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some thermal compound some compressed air
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a couple zip ties uh yes this will be
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one of uh those kinds of guides
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as well as i don't know maybe some duct tape uh fan speed controller and uh some
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hot glue yeah it's uh
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definitely one of those kinds of guides let's start by getting some initial
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readings first we want to know just how much of a
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difference it actually makes when your GPU fan stops spinning so you just need
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to taper up like that and then
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the real show begins
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and in a huge surprise to
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no one with no airflow the performance of these
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cards absolutely tanked the titan x went from
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a silky smooth 135 to a cinematic
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about 25 and at a core clock of 400 megahertz is
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basically unusable while the non-reference design 1070 did
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fare a little better even in our torture
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scenario of simulating the death of all three fans at once it throttled to one
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gigahertz and about 90 FPS after a half
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an hour a testament to both the efficiency of pascal and
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the clear value of this larger heatsink
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though with that said it's obviously still unacceptable performance so it's
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time to fix it up start by removing the
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shroud generally speaking a policy of
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you know remove any screws that look related and
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take lots of pictures while you go is a
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pretty safe bet here from here you'll need to unplug any
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lighting and power leads remove the fans with a bit more unscrewing so we just
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got five screws there each then oop
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there's some tape uh yeah more tape than i thought yeah
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and boom you got yourself a bare heatsink
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we're gonna secure our new fans with some zip ties
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that's right making sure of course to use decent ones so that they don't melt
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under a high load or get brittle and break over time
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i think this will work a lot better than stock this really wasn't quite what i had in mind for this one
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next we need to power our fans looks
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pretty good hey normally the easiest way is to run the
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cables to your motherboard or to a fan
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controller boop just like that
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now you could reuse the original fan header on your graphics card which would
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allow you software control in your GPU overclocking dashboard but
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it should be noted that some GPU fans
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are very very power efficient and the header might not be designed for
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something a little more power hungry so there is a chance that you could draw
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too much from it as for the titan x we've actually
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thoroughly covered the pain in the butt disassembly process for this guy here so
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we won't go into too much detail now but what we didn't show last time was how to
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remove the screws holding the fan in and
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extract the fan with a little bit of muscle and some help from a heat gun
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okay then now that the fan is out you can put the shroud back together and
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then attach the fans using the same technique that we did last time
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one thing that i would suggest kind of adding to the technique
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from the previous card though is some means of sealing around your fan so
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you've got a couple different options for that hot glue would be one maybe some kind of
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a of a double-sided like a foam tape but
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we're gonna go with good old-fashioned tuck tape
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okay not bad hey the results ended up being a
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bit of a mixed bag um so the ASUS 1070
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actually exceeded even my fairly optimistic expectations we ended up
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boosting to 2038 megahertz giving us an extra five
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frames per second in crisis versus the original three fans and we
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reached a maximum of 58 degrees celsius
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so honestly
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especially considering that we didn't even have to take off and replace thermal compound to
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do this i can't think of a good reason not to do this to any GPU that you can
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easily take the shroud off this freaking rocks
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as for our other card that one was a little disappointing especially given
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that this is a mod that i have personally performed in the past we
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ended up reaching a maximum of 91 degrees celsius and only about 600
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megahertz on the GPU to be clear that's better than no airflow at all
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but if you're running a very high power GPU you are either going to have to get
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a little bit more creative about your cooling uh perhaps removing the shroud
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altogether and you know attaching the fan directly to the fins would help or
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using a much much more powerful fan
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or you are just going to have to
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take it on the chin and order a full cooler off of ebay
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if you know i fix it you know they really like taking stuff apart and
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teaching people how to fix things
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they're constantly posting tear downs and repair videos for popular devices
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like the galaxy s8 the iphone and the nintendo switch and they're leading the
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charge in electronics repair whether you're looking for a hard to find
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adhesive seal to put something back together
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or a weird bit for your screwdriver so you can take something apart ifixit has
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probably got it and their iconic black
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and blue tool kit the pro-tec toolkit is now only 60 bucks you just throw it in
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your bag and you are ready to fix pretty much anything it's got suction cups it's
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got prying tools so you don't like scratch stuff as you're trying to take
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it apart it's got esd safe tweezers it's
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got tons of hard to find screwdriver
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bits like tri-wings and security torxes
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and the best part is that it's backed by ifixit's lifetime warranty
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so check out the 25 000 free repair guides over at ifixit.com and then buy
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yourself a pro tech toolkit for just 60 bucks so you can start repairing your
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own devices so thanks for watching guys if you disliked this video you can hit that
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button but if you liked it hit the like button get subscribed maybe consider
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checking out where to buy the stuff we featured at the link in the video
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description also down there is our merch store which has cool shirts like this
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one as well as our community forum which you should totally join