Just RMA the card (that's the process). The other option is to purchase an after market cooler. Or Getto mod it with a 80mm fan and some cable ties or rubber band.

tried cleaning the dust from the cooler with some compressed air and using some suitable "oil" ?

perhaps in the future it's a good idea to buy one of those cards that come with a lifetime warranty 😉

I agree with removing excess dust from the cooler. You could try using a small paintbrush and/or compressed air. Perhaps that's the problem and not the fan itself (worth a shot since it's still quiet at idle).

The card isn't actually that dusty. As I said, it's only a year and a half old, and I seriously doubt what little dust there is could be making it rattle as loud as it is, not to mention the fact it first started rattling WHILE it was already spun up to high speed during gameplay.

The PNY tech support people got back to me really quick and said the card's likely defective and the RMA process has begun, so I took the card out and am now running on the VGA output of my motherboard's integrated GeForce 6150 LE chipset... No hardcore modern 3D gaming for the next little while. :/

...good thing I didn't pick up Skyrim yet... though ironically, I was in the midst of playing Oblivion when this whole rattling thing started.

...also a good thing that video making doesn't require hardware acceleration. ADG will continue as normal! ;)

Two other points of interest:

1. All of my previous graphics cards up to now have been ASUS and their tech support is a joke compared to PNY so far. x_x;

2. Now that I've seen a properly calibrated VGA signal and DVI signal on my same monitor, I have to say, the DVI signal was definitely better, though it is hard to notice the difference unless you look really closely.

If you still have a warranty, send it in for repair. If you are out of warranty, this would be a good time to upgrade the cooling on the card. Video cards get too hot these days to risk a fan failure. It only takes a few seconds to roast your card beyond all repair once the fan fails.

Oh, and try taking the card out and blowing into the vents or the fan blades. You'd be surprised how much dust will come out.

This is why I only run cards with REAL heatsinks and not fans (of course I am woefully behind the times with voodoo3 and radeon 9850)

The fan on my PNY video card was embedded into one GIANT (thought mostly flat) heat sink that covered virtually the entire card. I looked through some of the other models they have and noticed some of them vent to the outside of the system and are so big they demand a free slot below them!

Also, their turnaround is apparently excellent. They said it could be up to 10 business days to get a replacement shipped but they got my card on Tuesday and sent a replacement Thursday. So now I'm just waiting for it to arrive. :)

For anyone curious, this is my exact card: http://www3.pny.com/font-color9999999800-GT-E … -P2860C396.aspx

The only trouble with getting this card originally was that it required a 400w minimum PSU with a 26 amp minimum on the 12v line. Even some 500w PSUs couldn't provide that, so I ended up with a 650w PSU when I got this card. ^_^;

Nowdays I am not getting anything that does not use heatpipes or an advanced cooling system , it just sucks when the stock coolers stop working and become noisy as hell!
I am currently using this gigabyte 560ti for the last 10-11 months, and so far so good

my previous 285gtx was from msi with a similar cooling system, no probs for 2-3 years too!

My replacement card arrived yesterday... DOA. >_>;;;

I imagine this happens every once in awhile. Heck, the replacement card they sent me was new in box and everything, with all the extra hookup goodies as before.

But after I installed it and tried to boot the system, the text mode came up completely garbled with some lines running horizontally through the upper-middle section of the display. I let the thing continue to boot and the Windows XP splash screen came up mostly fine, except it still had strange discoloured lines through it, and then I got a STOP error before the OS even had a chance to change resolution, again, partly garbled though not nearly as badly as the POST. Clearly the GPU and everything was working, my guess is the card has a RAM or ROM problem. One of my attempts to boot the system actually got the wrong sync signal from the card and wound up with a vertically stretched screen. o_O

At least I didn't have to pay import fees since it was a warranty replacement, so going through the RMA process a second time is still going to turn out far cheaper than buying a new card of equal power... just means I have to wait even longer to start playing 95% of my Windows games again. :/

Good thing you can run easily run DOSBox with onboard graphics! 😉

That's one good thing about Intel chipset graphics: They just work 😁

Not that it matters much now, but if the fan itself is doing a rattling or grinding noise, usually adding a dab of sewing machine oil to the fan from the back side, making sure it soaks in good, can get it going right again. I have even salvaged seized fans back to like new performance this way.

Mau1wurf1977 wrote:

That's one good thing about Intel chipset graphics: They just work 😁

Ha ha that pic is funny as hell man.

Well, I got my second replacement card yesterday, though waited to get the next ADG filler up before installing it.

Curiously, even though it's the exact same kind of video card, same clock speeds, memory and everything, it's a completely different form factor to the last one. The fan is on the opposite side, the heatsink assembly only covers about 2/3 of the card instead of 90% of it, and there's a bunch of capacitors on it that weren't on the original.

In any case, I installed it, got it working, and once again I have full graphics capabilities. :)

Curiously again, this one has a fixed fan speed, as opposed to a fan that spins faster or slower depending on temperature, and also, when the temperature of the card does change it makes this strange, metallic, tingly sound that's fairly subtle and would probably go unnoticed by most people. *shrugs*

Ah well. It works and I can finally play Skyrim and virtually every other hardware-accelerated game that I own and that's what matters! :D

^ typical cost-cutting techniques: smaller heatsink (= cheaper) and a fixed rpm fan to compensate on that... at least it's a different revision pcb (newer I assume) and it might be free from the problems of the earlier revisions...