Melty 1

I was doing a deep clean earlier today, and I booted her up afterwards, opened the hardware monitoring program from CPUID, noticed the GPU temperature rising from about 49-50C; I looked at the fan, thinking I accidentally unplugged it when cleaning, and it wasn't spinning, but after taking the card out, the fan was plugged in. I then tried to spin the fan by hand, but it was much harder to do so than it should have been.

I played with the fan a bit to try to get it to spin better, but wasn't horribly successful. I got it to the point where it should spin okay. Tried it again, and it kinda worked, but the temps weren't really stable, so I took the card out again.

I decided to take the plastic heat-sink shell off and use the Vantec Spectrum Fan Card from Ziggy to put underneath the graphics card. I was worried that it wouldn't hold well, seeing as the fan card was made to be inserted into a PCI slot and not a PCIe x16, but after testing it out, the PCIe slot seemed to stabilize the card enough.

When I turned Melty on, and opened up the hardware monitor, I saw the GPU temperature at 32C! I was so surprised, but then again, it made sense, since the fans are cooling majority of the heat-sink. I haven't seen the temps go higher than 50C, but I'll let time run the course and see what happens.

I was wanting to email HIS and request a replacement fan, but on the site they posted that they will not send out a replacement cooler/fan because the user can damage the graphics card if done by themselves (obviously voiding the warranty). The fan mounts to the plastic shell - the fan being easily removable without removing the shell - and the fan's power cable is pretty free, so to be honest, I think it's a bit much to say they won't send out a replacement fan (I can understand the concern with the heat-sink though). Needless to say, I'm not going to bother and I'm going to stick with Sapphire's video cards like I have been. (By the way, the shell is screwed into the heat-sink, so removal of the shell requires removal of the heat-sink, of which I did without any problems.)

After letting the fan sit face-up for a while, the fan seemed easier to spin, but also still didn't spin right, leaving me to think it's a problem with the bearing. I think the bearing uses oil instead of grease and the oil flowed out of the bearing area and caused it to lock up. Only reason I can think as to why oil was used instead of grease is the cost (I'm assuming oil's cheaper than grease). Even though I'm sure that's the problem, there's not exactly a way for me to fix it, as I'm not sure how to separate the PCB of the fan from the mounting bracket (where the axle access probably is).

When I'm able to, I think I'm going to upgrade Melty to a 7770, since I won't have to upgrade the PSU to compensate. We'll see though.