A while ago, my motherboard's chipset fan started making a loud grinding/rattling noise. I eventually found out that the screws holding the fan to the heatsink were vibrating against the heatsink. When realigning the screws failed several times I took them out and replaced them with rubber bands:
Above View
Side View
In order to do this I just knotted a rubber band in the middle, slid one end through the screw hole on the fan, and then hooked the loop under the corner of the heatsink. I clipped off the other half of the rubber band so it would not interfere with the fan blades. The bottom right hand corner of the heatsink in the second picture illustrates this most clearly.
This is a foxconn nf4uk8aa-8ekrs motherboard by the way. The chipset fan is noisy (~7000 rpm
), but not as bad it could be and easily drowned out by the stock athlon 64 heatsink fan, a problem which I will hopefully be fixing soon. I have had them like this for about a month now with no problems and no visible damage to the rubber bands. They are by no means stretched and the edges of the heatsink are not sharp. Also the heatsink gets warm, but does not quite feel hot.
Does anyone think I could have long term problems with this setup? Are there any durable, heat resistant, rubber bands that I could use? I was thinking that there may be a fan belt somewhere of the appropriate size, does anyone know where I could find one? Has anyone else used rubber bands in this way?
As far as this helping to silence a computer, outside of my situation in which the grinding noise easily drowned out the cpu fan, you would need a much quieter chipset fan before vibration would be heard over the fan
.
.
