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Some dish soap and an alcohol bath has brought this video card fan back to life

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First post, by Kahenraz

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I have a video card with a very odd heat sink and fan assembly. It isn't anything special cooling-wise and there are probably replacements available. The issue with this fan is that it was very dirty and would struggle to spin without a nudge to get it going. And even then it did not spin very well. I had nothing to lose by cleaning it so I tried.

I used a small brush and mild dish soap to clean away the dirt and gave it a liberal amount of drying inside and a thorough spin with canned air. I then gave it an alcohol bath to help dissolve any oils that may have gunned up. Alcohol used in this way may make some fans worse if it dissolves away any necessary bearing grease so it will depend on the kind if fan.

After removing it from the alcohol and giving it another thorough spray with canned air, it works as good as new! Now only does it spin well but there is no grinding or other unpleasant noise that typically accompanies a dying fan.

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Reply 1 of 2, by Joseph_Joestar

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Interesting approach. I'm not sure if leaving the fan completely without lubrication is a good idea though.

Personally, I use compressed air and contact cleaner liquid to get rid of any dirt and dust. After that, I apply some electric motor lubricant to the fan interior. Here's a video from Pixel Pipes which demonstrates this (around the 13:40 mark).

In my experience, this gets rid of the fan whirring noise about 80% of the time. In the remaining 20% cases, the fan is too far gone due to wear and tear, and needs to be replaced.

PC#1: Pentium MMX 166 / Soyo SY-5BT / S3 Trio64V+ / Voodoo1 / YMF719 / AWE64 Gold / SC-155
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PC#4: i5-3570K / MSI Z77A-G43 / GTX 980Ti / X-Fi Titanium

Reply 2 of 2, by Kahenraz

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A drop of oil can go a long way, and you're right that this should be done after the alcohol bath to keep the bearing lubricated. Depending on the fan, sometimes the bearing can be replaced entirely and the fan completely restored.

I plan to make another thread on this subject but I'm still waiting for the replacement part to come in the mail. This kind of repair is necessary for fans where no replacement is available or you want to try and retain the unique look of the original fan.

Here is an example of a completely rusted bearing I removed from a different fan:

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