First thing you can try is always to properly clean and grease the fan. Don't use oil under any circumstance, just silicone lube designed for fast moving small bearings (like those for fishing reels and so on). Keep in mind that you'll have to carefully remove the label at the back of the fan, then remove the rubber plug (if present) then take extra care when removing the teflon circular piece which is keeping the whole thing together. Clean carefully the ax and the bearing as there's all kind of gunk and debris to be found there.

What's wrong with oil? I've been using engine oil in my computer fans for years without any problems. Lube is lube, no?

I'd be concerned about longevity. Engine oil is intended for a different duty cycle.

I would agree with that. It seems I have to re-lube my fans every couple of years or so.

When I lubed the CPU fan in my Thinkpad T60 I used grease rather than oil. These fans came with no lubrication inside them at all, thus leading to early failure. There isn't even a bearing. It's just a fan sitting on top of a dry spindle. I hoped that the thicker grease would last longer than oil. So far it's been two years and the fan still works great.

KT7AGuy wrote:

What's wrong with oil? I've been using engine oil in my computer fans for years without any problems. Lube is lube, no?

nothing so long as its not penetrating oil. But its better to repack the fan's barrings with grease.

KT7AGuy wrote:

What's wrong with oil? I've been using engine oil in my computer fans for years without any problems. Lube is lube, no?

Oil is being used in applications where it can stay onto the parts that needs to be lubed. For example in car engines there's a pump at the bottom pushing the oil back up. It then falls down trough specifically designed channels and so on.

Grease on the other hand stays where it was applied, unless high temperatures melt it.

Now, on a fan that has rubber o-rings at the top and the bottom of the bearing, oil may do the job if applied very carefully. But most fans don't have two rubber o-rings so eventually the oil will end up either spilling around or sitting there doing nothing useful.

Change to an aftermarket cooler or get a different card. I would not bother with lubing sh!tty noisy fans, when there are plenty of properly design quiet coolers in the universe. 😁

Don't ignore the fact that any fan becomes shitty/noisy after eating dust for 3-4-5 years then probably sitting somewhere for the lube to dry out pretty well 😁

Adrian_ wrote:

Don't ignore the fact that any fan becomes shitty/noisy after eating dust for 3-4-5 years then probably sitting somewhere for the lube to dry out pretty well 😁

That's not really true.

Most of my desktop fans didn't. My primary desktop is 9 years old, and all 3 case fans (Gigabyte 570S) + CPU fan (Scythe Mine Rev. B) are still the originals, silent as on day 1. My previous desktop was a hit&miss in that regard.

As far as GPU fans go - the GTX660 that's currently in my desktop is still as silent as when I bought it (4.5 years ago). The original 9600GT fan lasted for ~6-7 years before it became noisy. My older GPU is a passively-cooled 6600GT, so no fan there. 😀

When it comes to laptops - almost all my laptop fans died at some point (as in - motor dead, don't spin) at some point during the life cycle of a laptop. Usually between 3-5 years as you said. But very few of them ever went through the shitty/noisy part before they died. I just replaced them.

Adrian_ wrote:

Don't ignore the fact that any fan becomes shitty/noisy after eating dust for 3-4-5 years then probably sitting somewhere for the lube to dry out pretty well 😁

Not true. Some fans seal up the motor and can run for 10+ years without getting louder. and some fan use magnetically suspended impeller shafts.

As for using oil, its not going to seep out if you use the right viscosity and not lay the back of the fan downwards.
I tend to use 1kw silicon shock oil for oiling the shaft of a fan after repacking or replacing bearings my self.

There are some high quality fans that have rubber o-rings at both ends of the axle plus good rubber plug on the back. IF the manufacturer also used silicone grease these could probably run for many years, until the rubber o-rings fail / get old and start to leak the lube out. But these are a lot of IF's - since I became interested in old hardware I've probably serviced well over a hundred of all sizes and types and only seen two that fit the above description. And these were both relatively modern high-end fans. There's no way the stock fan of a video card that old would have this type of fan on it.

Btw, no computer fan seals up the motor, they seal up the axle. Therefore even those of the type mentioned above can become noisy if a lot of gunk gets stuck between the rotor and it's hub on the stator.

Adrian_ wrote:

There are some high quality fans that have rubber o-rings at both ends of the axle plus good rubber plug on the back. IF the manufacturer also used silicone grease these could probably run for many years, until the rubber o-rings fail / get old and start to leak the lube out. But these are a lot of IF's - since I became interested in old hardware I've probably serviced well over a hundred of all sizes and types and only seen two that fit the above description. And these were both relatively modern high-end fans. There's no way the stock fan of a video card that old would have this type of fan on it.

Btw, no computer fan seals up the motor, they seal up the axle.

The type of fan you speak of I have seen on many video cards. I referb old hardware and sell it online. I done well over 100 video cards in one month. Higher end FX, GF6 and 7 cards had fans with sealed shafts. I seen a few on older aftermarket coolers aswell.

Delta has a few fans they seal up the motor in, you tend to see them in servers and industrial equipment/systems. A lot of fans used in servers/industrial systems have ip55 and ip65 rated motors so its far from unheard of to see a fan with a sealed up motor. I believe one of the bigger FFB models has a sealed motor.

That being said I have yet to see one a video card or consumer grade part. More so on old water cooling parts and larger case fans in servers and things like a CNC milling computers.

EDIT:
There are also a few company's that sell dust proof fans, they seal up the motor as well. How well I don't know.
IE
http://www.legitreviews.com/acoustifan-dustpr … iet-pc-fans_220

I know what you mean but IP-65 is far from being sealed off, it's actually an enclosure meant to withstand low pressure water spraying for a limited amount of time. It makes perfect sense for such fans to be used in watercooling applications. However I believe that our little debate on this matter is more a matter of semantics, to me "sealed off" when it comes to o-rings and gaskets means waterproof (like IP-67 at least) not IP-65.

Anyway, for the purpose of this discussion I believe we can agree that the fan of a 6800GT has rather slim chances of being the sealed shaft type and generally speaking having it cleaned and lubed would cost virtually nothing and can potentially make it a lot quieter.

Thanks for the replies guys! I appreciate the suggestion of lubricating the fan, and I did consider it, but I don't think that would solve the fundamental issue that it is a very small fan trying to move a lot of air meaning it has to move very fast creating a lot of noise.

Unbelievably, I actually found a computer store in Downtown Vancouver that appears to still have some brand new Arctic NV5 silencer coolers in stock for C$25, so I'm going to try and get down there to buy one this week and install it. Like you said dr_st I think an aftermarket cooler is the best choice, and should be kind of a fun retro project!

Nice find. NV5 werer really good coolers.

Anyway back to the hole sealed fan thing. Yes ip55 and 65 are far from sealed. But there are definitely sealed fans out thete for pcs. Like the one I linked and a handfull of delta fans too. Oddly i never seen a ip67 or higher raried fan. But i seen a few than could definitely be raited as such or higher.

Edit: as for a sealed shaft fan on a 6800. I seen a few 6800 with them. Its not all to uncommon on blower fans from its time.

how is the 6800gt compared to

6800xt
and
6800xe

i got an xfx 6800xt that i need to mod the heatsink because temps are crazy

and i got a 6800xe biostar that i read can be pipe unlocked but i have not found a tutorial on how to do it.

The 6800 XT varies greatly depending on manufacturer. It is produced using three cores (NV40/NV41/NV42), four memory configurations (128 MB DDR, 256 MB DDR, 128 MB GDDR3, 256 MB GDDR3, and 512 MB GDDR2), and has clock speeds ranging from 300-425 MHz (core) and 600-1000 MHz (memory). 6800 XT cards based on the NV40 core contain eight masked pixel pipelines and two masked vertex shaders, and those based on the NV42 core contain four masked pipelines and one masked shader (for some reason, the NV42 cards are almost never unlockable. It is speculated that the pipelines are being laser-cut).

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/176/geforce-6800-xt

https://www.techpowerup.com/gpudb/1819/geforce-6800-xe

Another option you "could" consider, is doing this mod I did years ago:

It's a 6800 vanilla. It ran very silent and has run for several years this way.
I did it like this as it was a very cheap solution and very easy to do.

The 6800 vanilla doesn't have very high power requirement and the 8cm fan seemed to cool it well enough.

Now that I think of it, I never actually measured the temps on it, but I did do a lot of "touching the heatsink" as I was concerned it wasn't cool enough..but it was.

I basically removed the top cover that sits on top of the heatsink and also removed the original fan, then placed this fan on top and plugged into a molex. Very very basic...but it works 😁