Heatsink question

D

Doc

New Member
I just booted up my first self-built comp and everything seems to be working. What I am worried about though is that the heatsink hasn't spun at all yet. I am currently in the process of installing XP pro and it has been on about 15 minutes formatting the hard drive and it has not moved yet. I have a Zalman 9700 and the neon green light is on and it is clearly plugged in to the motherboard.

Is this something to be worried about?
 
Before going any further shutdown and visually inspect the 9700 there to see if one of the fan blades is wedged into the copper array of fins. That happened here where the cpu was first seen at 107C! The hsf was hot since the tip of one blade was caught up. Give the fan a little push forward if you find it caught there.
 
Check your bios settings and see what the CPU fan control is set to? I don't know what exactly it should be, but play around with it and see if you can get it to spin.
 
With the 3/4pin connector going directly to the board try another spot for a case fan to see if you are not getting any from the cpu point. If you put the plug on over one pin that would also be a thought.
 
Looking at the BIOS, only the power fan is spinning, the sys fans and the heatsink are not. It says that my cpu is 20C though so there is no danger of overheating at the moment I suppose.

I unplugged the cpu fan and plugged it in again but it still does not spin. Will it only spin if the cpu gets too hot? Or is it always supposed to spin. Also, can I try and force it to spin in the BIOS somehow just to see if it is working?
 
with the computer on try wiggling the pc fan connector that's connected to the pins on the motherboard. it probably doesn't have a good connection.

if you have the stock intel fan then try plugging that into the cpu fan connector. if that also doesn't spin then it's a good indicator that there's something wrong with that connection.

after that do what pceye said. try plugging it into another slot. if you don't have another connection slot on the motherboard then buy an adaptor that can connect it to the 4pin molex or another slot

fans are supposed to always spin but they spin at different rates at different temps depending on what settings you choose in the bios
 
The fan doesn't always spin, but as I was messing around with the BIOS it began spinning hard and continued for quite a while. Dropped my cpu temp down to 17C. It spins every now and then, but more often than not it is not spinning. My cpu is nice and cool though.

Now if only I could stop this "error loading operating system" so I can really test it out...
 
If you saw the fan on the 9700 spinning then you know it's not likely the hsf with a problem but the board. The cpu fan always spins when a system is running. There's no shutoff for something like that while some boards allow the selection of different ranges for the fan speed itself.

The other option is to examine the connections between board and controller and that between the controller and hsf to see there's a contact problem there. If you had a multimeter you could check the continuity through the wires themselves.
 
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