Dragon ORB 3 - Anyone else have their FAN flame out?

[MadRat]

I was helping my brother with his brand spanking new Shuttle AK31A last night and we were having troubles getting it to post. I couldn't tell what it was over a phone conversation so I went over to his house. We thought it was a power supply issue, but it turned out that he forgot to remove the plastic strip on the thermal paste of his OEM heatsink. Before figuring that out though I told him to switch to his DO3/1GHz T-Bird to make sure the motherboard was working. He did and when he switched it on the fan made a strange growl and spun slower and slower until it eventually stopped. Burnout!

Well the beast had posted just fine but we are now out a 7000rpm fan. It wasn't all that dusty in the case nor was there any obstructions. The fan must have some design flaw in it to die so quickly. Its marked July 2001 on the fan, so its not like this is a heavily used fan!

Well after seeing that I looked at my brother and said this was not good. I was going to suggest he try the Palomino with the DO3 but now we could not. I looked at the heatsink he'd got with the CPU and noticed the obvious plastic cover on the thermal material. Yes, I slapped my head for not checking it out when he pulled it off. Now, where are we going to find a new 7000rpm fan that fits this Dragon Orb 3!?!

 

[Egrimm]

The fan on the DragonOrb3 is exactly the same as the Storm Fan attachment which ThermalTake makes to put on their older orbs. You just buy a Storm Fan and change the fan and shroud on the DragonOrb with it, easy!

The problem you mentioned is unfortunately not uncommon, it has happened to some of the first DragonOrb3s, but as yours aren't one of the first (I think, don't know when the first shipped, same as mine, see below) so you might just have been unlucky. It's easy to change the fan though, maybe their did this on purpose so that people would buy extra fans, hmm...
I've never had any troubles with my DragonOrb3 (also 7000rpm version, made in July too) except the noise, so when I upgraded to a XP 1600+ I got a Molex hsf instead, still have the DragonOrb lying around to be put to use when I need another hsf.