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I have a defective cooling fan, and would like to try and replace it. 

Anyone have some experience with this?  How difficult will it be? 

http://www.techpowerup.com/reviews/ASUS/EAH5970/5.html

To the op.  It is a complete pain in the ass but it can be done.

The same is true for any similar designed "reference" card.  5970, 5870, 6990, 6970, 6950, 7970, etc.

You should try my method to repair the fan before you toss it. You could save yourself like $20 for a new fan. Usually the problem is that the fans come with a very minimal amount of oil, a quick clean and 1-2 drops of fresh oil can totally revive fans unless they've been grinding on dry bearings for a long time.

I posted my method here:
https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=59942.0

If you have the fan, it's fairly easy - there are about 60 screws to do.  Pull apart, put together.

SUCCESS!!!  I feel so accomplished!

took me about 30 minutes.....really took my time trying not to mess anything up.  A lot of screws indeed.....a lot of SMALL screws!

Anyway, it is happily hashing away at 700 MH/s, holding a nice 70 degrees at 60% fan speed. 

Thanks for all the tips!

The biggest pain is those thermal pads and paste. They always get screwed up when opening the cards. It's good to replace that stuff though. I always do that when I buy used cards. One of my cards looked like someone used toothpaste or something. Never seen pure white thermal paste before.

Interestingly enough......the thermal paste on this one looked really good.  Either it was not used much by the previous owner, or he refurbished it. 

Good to hear it went smoothly.  Key requirement for those "tiny" screws is a good quality and right sized screwdriver.

On the thermal paste, mix a small amount of fine grade oil into it and it becomes usable (I will not say like new).  I use spray on CRC.  Been doing that on cpus and gpus for over a year - saves a fortune on paste.

I don't think having the paste thin is good. I had some artic silver 5 which is very thin and easy to apply but later the card was getting hot and I replaced it with some antec formula 7 paste I had which was very thick and the temps dropped 5 degrees. It's a little annoying since I payed a lot more for the artic silver and had to order it online.

Pays to do some research on what the thermal conductivity rates are - too thick is actually bad.  You should be looking for something that simply fills the imperfections of flat to flat surface.

btw - I read a review that ranked toothpaste close to commercial thermal paste for a short-term solution.

lol, I did do some research. Everyone seems to like that artic silver 5. I have to go with the results I'm seeing though. The thick stuff is definitely working for me. One of my pc's runs in mid 60's with 3x 5970's. Which most of that is to do with the case having good cooling. It all ends up pretty thin by the time its screwed down and heated to 80c.

Today I extracted a 5970 because the fan is working really hard to spin, so I'll be doing another fan replacement this weekend.  All those damn screws.

I just replaced the fan on one of my Sapphire 5970s.  I cleaned and reapplied the GPU thermal paste but kept the old pads for the VRMs and RAM.  The card mines now at reasonable temperatures but smells more like "hot electronics" than my other cards.  I'm worried that the RAM or VRMs are burning up.  Is there any way to monitor the non-GPU temperatures on the card?  Has anyone had success taking the heatsink off and on without replacing the thermal pads?

Some guy mixed Thermal paste with micron diamond powder (expensive) and had good results.

I have 2 5970 ref. coolers (fan+sink+shroud) for free+pp if anyone is interested? I have no use for them after wc my rig, live in Denmark. I prefer to give them to people in need and not for resale.

Just GPU-Z, for vrm info. The card may already be damaged. Mine always seem to show scorching in the same spot. They start mining at lower clocks speeds, then eventually that doesn't even work. It's probably nothing though, if the card is performing normally. You don't need to replace the thermal pads. It's a good idea if they are dried out, and damaged when you remove the block.