Hello and welcome to the forum! 😀

It isn't unusual for old fan bearings to be worn out or missing lubrication. you can try removing the sticker on the back of the fan and lubricating the bearing with silicone oil or sewing machine oil (I hope this is the right term).
For extra poits disassemble the fan and clean the axle and bearing before lubricating.

As far as I can tell the heatsink assembly is glued to the card on your model so it isn't going to be easy replacing the whole thing. You can often replace the fan by mounting a new 40mm fan on top of the heatsink instead though that's a bit of a ghetto mod. 😉

Back around the year 2000 I had a dual P3 that I used for digitising camcorder tapes. At the time I used a Pinnacle DC capture card - it would do both composite and svideo capture and hardware compression (to M-JPEG if I recall).

If you want to keep a period-correct build, then tracking down one of those could be an option.

Thanks for the replies.

Are you saying that the bearings and lube could be bad on an unused item due to entirely to age? It was new in box when I got it (but also old). Came with all the manuals CDs, adapters, anti-static bags, etc.
This is (allegedly) the first time it has been installed and used. It did have a slight, funky metallic smell coming off of it when I opened the bag, but I don't know if that's important.

Speaking of other capture cards... I also have an alternate capture card I tried, but it has problems.
The Power Mac G4 I had in college has an "AlchemyTV DVR" TV tuner/capture card in it that I used to use to record TV shows. I never noticed back then, but it turns out that it hasn't been capturing proper 29.97 fps. It looks pretty normal, but the metadata on playback of captured clips says things like 27.96 and other random numbers for whatever reason (I think I verified these were recorded fps, not playback fps). I don't know if it's due to the PATA hard drives, the G4 processors, the amount/type of RAM,the capture card, or something else, but I want full 29.97 interlaced video and this card's not currently doing it.

Also, the analog video capture experts on DigitalFAQ insist that Mac isn't good for digitizing analog video (I know you can do it, but they say the results are inferior), hence, I'm building this Windows XP machine with recommended ancient video card. I want exact, archival copies of my tapes.

Zeta83 wrote on 2021-04-17, 15:14:

Thanks for the replies.

Are you saying that the bearings and lube could be bad on an unused item due to entirely to age? It was new in box when I got it (but also old). Came with all the manuals CDs, adapters, anti-static bags, etc.
This is (allegedly) the first time it has been installed and used. It did have a slight, funky metallic smell coming off of it when I opened the bag, but I don't know if that's important.

Yes, it's definitely possible that the 20+ year old grease on that (probably sleeve) bearing has gone hard. It's worth a try to clean and re-oil it. Don't use a WD40 or equivalent - that will ultimately dry and leave a film that will increase friction, you really need a fine grease or machine oil (like sewing machine oil)... and only a tiny amount!

Are you saying that the bearings and lube could be bad on an unused item due to entirely to age?

Yes. Some bearings contain non-metallic parts that can age and even if they don't the oil deteriorates over time.

Ok thanks for the advice. I'll have to take a look at the bearing.