There isn’t much discussion about this anyplace I looked, so I thought I’d bring it up here, see if anyone has some insight.
We’re dealing with this:
The little fan is pretty loud, and it develops a character as it ages (not in a good way).
It looks like your dad’s 40mm fan, but it’s not:
I know the lighting sucks but it might be possible to see that the fan’s square frame is only for mounting; the fan house is circular and sunk into the heatsink. (Guess it’s also a fansink now.)
Does anyone know of a good quality (silent-er) fan that might fit? Or a heatsink replacement with such a fan? The heatsink is also weird with those two white posts mounting/tensioning.
It’s an expensive card going into an expensive system so I don’t know if I’d want to risk gluing a heatsink+fan combo on the chip.
If you can’t find a perfect replacement for the fan, you could always just attach any standard 40mm fan to the heat sink.
The different bolt pattern shouldn’t matter since the original screws were just threaded between the fins of the heat sink, and the fact that it wouldn’t sit flush into the recess cut out for the original fan would actually help with noise because there would be less resistance to airflow.
The only issue may be the added height depending on how thick of a fan you use and if any cards are installed underneath this one
Yup, thanks, that’s definitely something to maybe fall back on. I have some ideas that are worth trying with this concept. I definitely can’t just bolt on a 10mm thick fan and expect to keep use of the slot below, but maybe that’s not an issue (and in that case could even go with a 20mm thick Noctua.)
You can use screws of the same threading but longer for a standard 40mm fan, check the voltage the fan runs at
