Pro tip: check your PSU fan before assuming the noise is a bad bearing

Last month I was diagnosing a loud grinding sound in a Dell Optiplex at my shop in Denver. Pulled it apart, cleaned everything, even swapped the GPU fan, but the noise kept coming back. Turns out the PSU fan was hitting a loose cable that had shifted during transport - anyone else skip the power supply on noise checks and regret it?

2 comments

2 Comments

angela_park3d ago

Has anyone else just assumed it was the GPU or case fans and spent hours chasing the wrong problem? I did the exact same thing with an old custom build a few years back, replaced all the case fans and even the CPU cooler fan before I finally stuck my ear near the PSU shroud. That loose zip tie rubbing against the fan blade was so obvious once I actually looked, but I was dead set on it being a bad bearing (you know, that classic grinding sound). Now I always unplug the PSU and give it a good listen before tearing anything else apart, it saves so much time and energy. Point is, we all forget the power supply can be a noise culprit too, especially in those cramped prebuilt cases where cables get shoved everywhere.

paul33020m ago

Man, how do you actually go about isolating the PSU fan without taking the whole thing apart? I usually just grab a paper towel tube and stick one end to my ear then poke the other end around inside the case. Works way better than trying to listen through the side panel. I learned that trick after I spent three hours swapping fans on an old HP prebuilt only to find out the PSU fan had a wire poking into the blade. Now I always do that tube trick first before I even touch a screwdriver.