Running Repairs

I leave my computer running 24 hours a day. My excuse for this non-green waste of resources is that it’s running the BBC’s Climate Change Experiment. One night last week, the computer shut itself down. Checking the event log, I found that the graphics card had overheated. The inside of the PC seemed to be dustfree, but I cleaned everything anyway. I also kept an eye on the temperature of the graphics card. Sure enough, it did seem to be wildly fluctuating – mostly about 80º C, but occasionally shooting up to the mid-nineties. After several more forced shutdowns, I identified the cause of the problem – the fan on the graphics card wasn’t running efficiently – its bearing was shot.

 

So off to the local computer shop to see what could be done. The best shop locally is Hecosys, in Silvolde. A veritable Aladdin’s cave for computers. They recommended simply replacing the fan with a third-party cooling product, rather than replacing the entire card. So that’s what I did, at a tenth of the price of a new graphics card. I bought a Zalman fan (a VF700-Cu) from them, and now the card is running at 50º C – and I can’t hear the fan at all. I’m a happy bunny again.