rrrrrrrrrrrrrrrruuuurrrrrrrrruuuuuuuuuurrrrrr, Part IV

Part III is here, follow links to previous posts of same topic.
The customer support email from my video card's maker reports that they do not provide replacement cooling fans for their products. If it were still under warranty, I could send them the complete video card and they'd repair it. Ahhhh, no.

So until I find a fan of the right dimensions, I have slicked the fan up with both BreakFree (liquid teflon) and graphite grease, slipped inside the motor by a length of dental floss.

As the title of the post suggests, the fan is much quieter. Now the problem has entered a new realm: what if it stops making noise completely? Is it is running smoothly or totally fried and letting the graphics processor bake to thermal runaway?

The hunt for a replacement fan continues. I see kits at the Computer Store with Real Geek Girls, which include a gigantic frigging aluminum heatsink that wraps around the whole video card, and a heat pipe for God knows what, which means I'd have to remove the heatsink that's already there and cram half a kilo of metal into that space. This sounds counterproductive to me. The new heatsink would have to be thermally greased to the GPU. A replacement fan just has to blow air across the existing, greased heatsink.

Update: 24 hours later, the G4 sounds like it did just before the basement cleaning that started this whole mess, and the video card maker emailed back saying they can't even recommend a replacement fan as a purchased part. Too bad, because I read the manufacturer's name and part number from this one, found them online, saw drawings and specs for the fan, yada yada. The video card maker could have made a couple of bucks off of me---I probably would even have found it in my repair budget to have it shipped Second Day Air.

My daughters are acquiring the basics of capitalism while those guys are losing them.