GPU fans after a year of running

[adaseb]

i dont think gpu fans easily brokable parts. i never change them until 2+ years. but im thinking to change thermal compound before this summer.

Don't change thermal paste on older GPUs.

They are usually glued on to the heatsink and you might break the solder balls trying to seperate them. It wont help with the temperatures either.

Once the solder balls have microcracks the GPU will be garbage eventually.

[jumphost404]

So some of my fans are now wobbly or fail to spin. What are the options here? replace fan or housing? Trim the edges that are catching? Mostly looking at gigabyte 480s and msi 480s. Is there an aftermarket place for this?

At what rpm did you use your video cards, how many percent....50..60% or what?

I let claymore control the fans, I never changed the bios on my 480rx’s. The environment they were in was pretty hot for a while for about 6 months but they are staying cool in the winter, for now. So I imagine they were close to 80% full time for a year.

[jumphost404]

That's why I love the Sapphire dual ball bearing X-Fans. One screw to take off the fan for maintenance and cleaning and no wires to run or deal with. Replacements are $12.50 each including shipping from Sapphire and they are super easy to replace.


https://image.ibb.co/jKSOWw/Sapphire_X_Fans.jpg

Yeah I stayed away from Sapphire ever since the 6950/7950 days. I changed every single fan on over 30 6950 because every one failed in 2 years and some of the ones on my 7950s I changed more than 3 times. I guess Sapphire got sick of RMAs for fans and improved their fan quality and modular design.

I have yet to have a single Twin Frozr fan fail - they must protect from dust intrusion really well.

6 out of the 10 sapphires I’ve had have failed me. I will never buy a sapphire again. This is not even fan related. I RMA’d one but it came back to me unable to mine.

[jumphost404]

Yeah I got a bunch of the Gigabyte windforce fans. They are crap. Worse than the ones I had on my Gigabyte Radeon 7970 and those were also horrible.

There are 3 things you can do


1) Send it in for warranty. Doesn't make much sense right now because you will get it back when Ethereum goes POS

2) Take off the fan with shroud and zip-tie on a couple of case-fans. This method might require some rewiring however and it will make the GPUs take up more room. But case fans are very reliable.

3) Fix your current fan that's dead.


Basically you do this. Get some floss or some string. Once you got the blade off, just use mineral oil, 3-1 oil, motor oil, pretty much anything except WD40.


https://us.v-cdn.net/5021640/uploads/editor/nm/e1tmfw3kqa7v.jpg

Here is a video

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EnYWO_ypEXI



Keep in mind these fans are absolute crap, and on some I ended up ripping off the stator from the mount plate. No big deal, just need to put some super glue and snap it back in.

And it will work good as new. You might have to repeat this every 3 months - 1 year.

Not sure if these are going back in 😝
https://imgur.com/gallery/IalfL

[jimmykl]

There's some good guides around fan maintenance on this blog:

http://cryptomining-blog.com/8138-how-to-maintain-and-repair-dual-x-and-other-non-serviceable-gpu-fans/

Including how to replace sleeve bearing fans with ball bearings on some models:

http://cryptomining-blog.com/9237-fixing-gigabyte-windforce-vga-fans-for-gpu-mining-rigs/

http://cryptomining-blog.com/9268-more-on-gigabyte-windforce-vga-fans-for-gpu-mining-rigs/

[Bitsaurus]

That's why I love the Sapphire dual ball bearing X-Fans. One screw to take off the fan for maintenance and cleaning and no wires to run or deal with. Replacements are $12.50 each including shipping from Sapphire and they are super easy to replace.

Yeah I stayed away from Sapphire ever since the 6950/7950 days. I changed every single fan on over 30 6950 because every one failed in 2 years and some of the ones on my 7950s I changed more than 3 times. I guess Sapphire got sick of RMAs for fans and improved their fan quality and modular design.

I have yet to have a single Twin Frozr fan fail - they must protect from dust intrusion really well.

6 out of the 10 sapphires I’ve had have failed me. I will never buy a sapphire again. This is not even fan related. I RMA’d one but it came back to me unable to mine.

The VRMs on those 280X Dual-X were also crap. There are at least 10 posts here of people who had their card burn or entire rigs catch on fire because of bad VRMs.  You combine bad fans plus cheap VRM cooling and you have high failure rate. That cards did mine well when they weren't busy dying.

[deliciousblocks]

I had fans on Asus DCU II, and DCU III Strix fail exactly after 1.5 years after running at low silent speed 33% max, they started to rattle slightly and later became really noisy. So I guess every gpu manufacturer uses really shitty fans. I hope they are stocking up fans right now because in 2 years they will be flooded with RMA's.
It looks like only Sapphire stepped up their game. They understand we also don't want to RMA the whole card and wait for it for weeks.

[adaseb]

With Sapphire they had good products in the past. The Sapphire 7950 was solid. But the Dual-X 280X they released was crap and exploded if you tried mining. I think lately they have improved.

All non-reference fans will fail sooner or later. Only the blower reference style fans seem to last forever.

[Corsa1r]

Worst fans I ever had was VTX3D 280x, both of them rattled out of the box and where extremely noisy and did not cool good. Had to replace them immediately to Arctic Accelero Xtreme gpu cooler, that thing is really good but huge and expensive. My sapphire Dual-X 7950 still works like a charm after 2 years of mining. I retired it from mining though.

[exus]

12 months of mining and I only had problems with zotac amp fans, fixed with some drops of oil

[Kronny]

after 10 months i had problems with 1070 g1 gigabyte.
10 months with 75% fan

[Set Ready Go]

This is why i bought the sapphires rx 470s and the xfx rx 480s because just buy a few extra spare fans and easy to change too

[crocozino]

so I might say some cards are good to work 6 month and even more, while other fans just dies after 2-3 month! Shame!
I have some Asus and Palit Cards to watch, one fan on Palit GTX1080 -became faulty, so I have to replace it.
I guess I have to to some magic with oil in order to prevail bad thing with other fans

[baga105]

I used to take bad fans off and put the "computer case fans" to the GPU, which were connected via Molex to the PSU. The cheapest way for the replacement fans if you ask me