Computer Question - Video Card Fan

[LMITOUT]

My PC has a Nvidia Gforce 8300 GS video card and the cooling fan is going south. It appears that the fan can be removed and replaced but not sure if there is anything special about the fan or if I can just go to a PC parts HSOforum and order a fan of similar size. I have a bad feeling it won't be easy to find a replacement that'll fit and attach correctly.

[Whoaru99]

Yeah...depends on the fan.

The fan went out on my GF's son's 7300GT and I replaced it with a totally passive cooler. The cooler was large, and negates the use of one card slot below the video card, but it cools decently and makes zero noise. Got it from New Egg.

[LMITOUT]

[upnorth]

The biggest things is you have to match the voltage. Not sure how they are attached, they used to use some sort of adhesive. How expensive is a replacement card or better yet is it still under some sort of warranty? We normally won't bother with stuff like that and just replace the card, so I don't know a whole lot about it.

[LMITOUT]

There are two push screws that hold the entire module onto the card (see black screws on top of case). There is also some adhesive that hold the fan and heat sink assembly to the chipset. Heat paste I'm assuming.

I'm guessing a replacement card is a couple hundred bucks.

[Whoaru99]

I'm guessing a replacement card is a couple hundred bucks.

Don't know that the model numbers exactly go in sequence, but there are cards with higher and lower model numbers on New Egg for well under $100.

Dunno the type of card you need, but there is a EVGA GeForce 8600GT 256MB DDR3 RAM PCIe for $39 after rebate.

The cooler I bought to fix a lesser card cost more than half that.

[upnorth]

Quote:

I'm guessing a replacement card is a couple hundred bucks.

I would look around a bit. I found the 8400 series from NVIDIA for $44 on CDW. Video cards are not expensive as they used to be.

[LMITOUT]

Yeah, I haven't priced out cards in a while and they're obviously cheaper than I had remembered. I'm guessing the drop in memory price also affected the video card market. Probably easier just to get a new card than try to deal with fans that don't fit.

Thanks!

[Nick Kuhn]

Yeah, I haven't priced out cards in a while and they're obviously cheaper than I had remembered. I'm guessing the drop in memory price also affected the video card market. Probably easier just to get a new card than try to deal with fans that don't fit.

Thanks!

Yeah, on a low end card there is no reason to go with an aftermarket cooler. Actually it's so low end the fan probably isn't even 100% necessary if you have decent airflow in the case. You could unplug the fan and run a graphics intense program for about 5 minutes. Grab a hardware monitoring tool and watch the temps, if they don't exceed 85c and you don't notice any artifacting on the monitor than just keep it that way.