Fans Out of Control!!!

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OldOneEye

New Member
Ok. I've been working on this for a while. So here is the run down:

Spilled saltwater into my computer(D'oh!), disassembled it, washed it in tap and then in distilled water, I let it dry a week, reassembled it and it seemed to work fine. Then I discovered that the fan was unusually fast, and that when I ran anything graphic intensive on the screen that the fan would go crazy. Using a heat gun I tracked the highest temps in the case (160s F) to my GPU which made sense because the fans only went crazy with Half-life 2 on the screen, and when I would alt-tab to Windows they would calm down, I have since replaced my 6800 with an 8800, but that did not solve the problem. Then I replaced the fans, but that did not solve the problem. The CPU is not getting above 112F using my infrared heat gun, So what is left? This computer is a dell XPS Gen 3 with a C8180 LGA775 Dell motherboard. Please Help!!! I've been working on this forever! Keep Sea-Monkeys away from your computers!!!
 
Oh the senseless slaughter of sea-monkeys.............

Might I ask what exactly did you wash in tap water? And why? Because, logic says, that you don't wash anything electronic, whether or not it even has an electrical current still in it, with regular old tap water, even distilled water for that matter. The safest way to clean electrical components is with 90% iso-something rubbing alcohol and a lint-free, non-conductive cloth.

And what fan is it exactly? Is it your graphics card fan? If it is, you might have damaged something with your bus. You also may have possibly set your fan to run at a faster RPM with a program.
 
he did say sea monkeys:)

if u have replaced the fans and it is still running fast i think like bumblebee tuna said u might have accidentaly set the fan speeds to a higher rpm
 
1. Which fan or fans is/are spinning too fast? Stop one at a time if you're not sure.
2. What are software measurements saying that your temperatures are? Even if these aren't accurate readings, they are the ones that the system will use to control the speeds of any thermally controlled fans.
3. Which fan did you replace? Case fan? CPU?
4. Is it spinning too fast or just too loud - if it's the latter it could be a damaged bearing.
 
Ok. Since you're all asking. I had a tank of Sea-Monkeys on my computer desk. I picked them up to move them and the lid fell off and the tank fell onto my desk and the water spilled out and off the edge and into my tower.

Ok, now back to my current status:

To answer your questions.

It is the CPU Fan, two fans actually. One for intake and one for output. I found a picture here:
3.jpg

The Big Green thing that says XPS. That's the fans, You can see the heatsink in there.

As for temperature readings... I was using Speedfan and it used to have 3 readings for me. "remote" "HD0" and "CPU" *I think* But now that I've changed GPUs all that shows up is "HD0", which is my Hard Drive and it stays relatively cool. It is the CPU fan that I have already replaced. The Big Green thing in the picture, It is spinning too Fast! It's not just too loud, but it gets very loud when it gets going fast.

And to BumblebeeTuna, I washed the computer in tap, because at the time I was in my College dorm and had no distilled water available, Salt water is rediculously corrosive so I had to wash it off with Something! As for the distilled water, I researched what I should do to clean my computer before I did and Distilled water seemed to be the consensus. But I did use alcohol down in some nitty gritty areas.
 
Probably my biggest worry would have been the salt water shorting something out. What I would have done (besides turning the puter off immediately and unplugging everything), I guess, was to let the mobo dry out and then clean and rinse off the slat crystals that were left behind with rubbing alcohol.

If you said you replaced a fan, you might have damaged a sensor or messed with Speedfan sense replacing the fans didn't fix anything. My own current mobo has no fan control so the fans are always at a constant 100%.....

If it's you CPU fan, maybe the salt water messed with the thermal paste on your CPU and now your getting high temps....?
 
The computer was not on when the spill occurred. No power in there cept the Cmos Battery. I took out the CPU when I washed everything and applied new heat transfer paste, So I don't think that's the problem. I don't think heat is the problem. Look at these details.

The fans speed up when a demanding application is on screen. (Half-life 2)
When I close that application or Alttab out of it, the fans IMMEDIATELY slow down. Is that not... strange?

Should I replace the motherboard?
 
You know what you should do? You should get a water cooling system and put your sea monkeys in that! Problem solved.
 
PROBLEM SOLVED!!! Thanks for trying all, but the problem was..... THERMAL COMPOUND!!!
When I took apart the computer, I wiped off all the thermal compound between the CPU and Heatsink. When I went to put it back together, never having built a computer before, I just asked my dad to pick up some heat transfer compound at RadioShack. Turns out it was crap, I ordered some Arctic silver 5 from Newegg. It arrived today, I wiped off the old and put this stuff on. IT runs Quiet as a mouse!!! I couldn't believe the night and day difference!
 
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