You might try eliminating the fan altogether.
The following quality observation appears in page four of a review of the EpoX 8KHA+ DDR Socket A motherboard (
http://duxcw.com/digest/Reviews/MBs/Epox/8kha/4.htm):
"Just about when I was going to start calling this board the "A+" board I saw one glaring indication of poor quality. The word "sleeve" on the small cooling fan on the VIA Northbridge. On top of the fan it says: Cooler Master, etc., the company that sells the entire heatsink-fan unit. Unscrewing the fan from the heatsink and looking at the bottom reveals the true manufacturer and model number of the little thing that spins: T&T MW-410M12S. I cannot find any information on the fan on CoolerMaster's web site (
http://www.coolermaster.com/home.html); and no product info at all on T&T's web site (
http://tranyoung.com.tw/home.asp), which appeared to be broken when I tried it. Fans with sleeve bearings usually have a specified lifespan of about 20,000 hours and single bearing, ball bearing fans roughly twice that long. My experience with chipset fans is limited, but with CPU sleeve fans it shows that you will be lucky if one doesn't break within a year of average use. And before they do break they have a nasty habit of expelling bearing residue in the form of a fine black powder, which seems to have an affinity for motherboards and is probably not too good for them. Passive cooling would be more reliable and the chip/motherboard should be designed to make it possible. If fans are used they should be high quality and have ball bearings.?
Well, the customer who bought the third computer we built with this motherboard a couple of months ago called and said his computer made a funny noise when he turned it on that morning and asked if I had any idea what was causing it. I said yes (sigh!) and he brought it in to my shop. Sure enough, the bearing of the fan on the Northbridge had failed. Well, I searched for a replacement and was about to pay $10.99 for a heatsink-fan with a ball bearing fan and over $10 to have it shipped in ASAP when I decided to pull the fan by unscrewing the four screws securing it to the heatsink and see how hot the heatsink really got without the fan. I was surprised to find that it was barely warm to the touch. I then exercised the system with a bunch of benchmarks and discovered that it hardly got any warmer at all. In fact, the air coming from the Thermaltake Volcano 5 CPU heatsink-fan (
http://www.thermaltake.com/) right next to it was warmer. I then checked around and discovered that the MSI (
http://www.msicomputer.com/product/chipset/via_kt266.htm) and Gigabyte (
http://www.gigabyte.com.tw/products/7vtxh+.htm), KT266A motherboards) use passive cooling for the Northbridge and the heatsinks do not look anymore substantial than the one that was left on the 8kHA+. Usually, I do not like to second-guess a motherboard manufacturer?s engineers, but this time I think EpoX?s engineers have it wrong (they sure had it wrong when they specified a fan with a sleeve bearing. I don?t think the KT266A Northbridge needs a fan. I told the customer so and returned the computer to him without it.
If EpoX wishes to educate me on the reason for the fan, I am more than willing to listen. That is, if they are not going to tell me the fan is there for extreme overclocking because we and the CPU manufacturer (AMD) do not recommend overclocking processors.
I fully realize that the failure of a single fan bearing is statistically insignificant (unless you happen to have built a computer with the fan that failed) as far as reaching any conclusions about the entire population of these fans?"
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