So my computer was making some weird clicking noises

[Karl_Rosner]

About a month ago I noticed that my computer started making weird ticking noises when I was doing any thing intensive, gaming, video editing, stuff like that. Weird thing was it didn’t sound like a hard drive failing, it was more hallow and not clicky enough, just a really really strange sound.

Alright so I know it’s mechanical, but it’s probably not my hard drives, just to be sure I ran a health check on them and they were green. So what the hell was happening? The only way to be sure was to open up my computer and have a look.

So I took the computer out from under my desk, it’s built into a Meshify C and has great thermals while being nice and compact. The first thing I notice is that my case fan setup was really stupid! I had these Thermal-Take RING RGB fans in there. This particular system is powered off of these huge hubs which only fit 3 fans and require special cables to sync to other hubs. All of that junk was crammed behind the back panel and made working on the system SUPER difficult. So I yanked all of it and replaced it with some 120mm Arctic value PWM fans. Same performance at 1/4th the cost and no more clutter.

While I was at it I also gave the computer a dusting and disconnected both of the hard drives to do some A/B testing, you know put a load on the PC and see if it started clicking. however while I was swapping out the fans I noticed something, weird the hard drive cage which is screwed to the bottom of the case was sliding back and forth on it’s mounting rails. Also it was RIGHT beside one of my front case fans.

Hmmmm I thought, could the screws have loosened over time from vibrations? Yeah they could have and the entire thing was surrounded by all kinds of power cables and other garbage that could act like a spring. The fan might push it back and the cables push it forwards and the entire thing could have gotten to rocking when the fans got up to speed under load. Well I tightened the screws and did some cable management, and hooked up one drive to do some testing.

The results? No more clicking no matter what I’ve been doing for the last week. So, the moral of the story is make sure screws are nice and tight and dont buy garbage RGB fans no matter how cool they look.

[level1]

I had some strange intermittent ticking out of my Antec P180 many years ago. Ended up tracing it to a Noctua NF-S12A fan installed on the front of the case and oriented to pull air into the case.

In a very narrow speed range (i.e. at quite specific internal temperatures) the fan blades would every-so-often clip part of the the grille cut into the case. Because the temperature that triggered the clipping was only in a transitional band I only heard the ticking briefly when the system was either ramping up, or ramping down, but not when running flat-out or lightly loaded.

A piece of paper, folded a few times, and jammed inder one side of the fan, was sufficient to act as a ~0.4mm stand-off, and prevented further clipping.

[Katie]

I immediatelly assumed it would be the fans or hard drive cage as well. The cage in my PC used to cause a lot of noise by vibrating. The solution? I added few foam pieces between few moving cages and took the empty toolless ones out. It’s all fine now.