MSI fans leaking oil?

[Leyawiin]

I was looking at several MSI Radeon cards and noticed some of the user reviews report failing fans and leaking oil spraying on the inside of their PCs. Either that or fans that spin very slowly allowing the cards to overheat. Have any of you had experience with this particular cooling solution from MSI? Think its found on many/most of their higher end cards at the moment. Kind of surprised me. I own an HD 7850 2GB Twin Frozr and its been great.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16814127759
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127786

 

[DesiPower]

?? Video card now have oil cooled radiators?? wow...

 

[96Firebird]

?? Video card now have oil cooled radiators?? wow...

Oil impregnated fan bearings...

 

[SlowSpyder]

I think this was mentioned earlier, maybe in the mining thread? MSI uses a lubricant for some of the fan bearings on certain models. When people were mining with them loaded nearly 24/7 some of that lube leaked out of the fill hole ( :whiste: ). If I remember correctly they made the fill hole smaller, from 3mm to 2mm to stop them from leaking, and maybe less lube.

 

[Leyawiin]

Ah, so basically an unusual circumstance I wouldn't encounter as a casual gamer.

 

[blastingcap]

Ah, so basically an unusual circumstance I wouldn't encounter as a casual gamer.

MSI made an official statement about alleged fan oil leakage a while back.

http://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showthread.php?t=18585437

Look especially at post 29 in that thread:

Hi Guys,

Thanks to OCUK Staff members for bringing this forum topic to our attention.

We are aware that some customers have been experiencing issues with our latest AMD GAMING Graphics Cards, notably the R9 Series.

MSI takes this issue seriously.

What is the issue?
Some cards manufactured pre-January are experiencing oil leakage from the fans.

How is this caused?
Oil leaks from the fans hub when the fans are spinning at 100% over a long period of time under high heat conditions.

Why is this happening?
We have seen a huge spike in sales numbers since late November when the BitCoin-Cryptocurrency mining craze started to kick off. Thus, customers have been using our R9 Series of GAMING Graphics Cards since mid-December to mine coins over a 24-HR, 7 days a week period which these cards are not designed for.

The details...
Basically our cards are designed mainly for one thing.. gaming (the clue's in the name). They are not intended for use under "industrial" load conditions where they would be needed to run flat-out continuously day after day, week after week with potential high heat levels.

MSI HQ have been working on the fix since late December to make some changes to our Twin Frozr coolers to stop this from happening. At the centre of the fan there is a 3mm gap inside where a specially made gel is inserted to keep our fans running smoothly and quietly to give you the award-winning silent conditions during idle and gaming modes you have seen and/or heard about. MSI has since reduced this to 2mm. This doesn't sound much but has in fact solved one of the issues whereby there was extra space for air to squeeze inside the area alongside the gel to cause tiny air bubbles that (while at 100% fan load for a long period of time) forces the gel to leak out onto the fan shroud and surrounding area.

The final issue that was fixed was simply not to put as much gel inside the fans core. We intentionally put more gel into this area during production to ensure your cards would continue to run smoothly and that durability would never decrease. Sadly our good intentions came back to hurt us since many customers are using R9 Graphics Cards (and R7) to mine for coins jumping quickly onto the Cryptocurrency bandwagon. Our cards we're not designed for this. Under normal gaming conditions this would not happen (rare cases it may). MSI HQ wanted (yet again) to improve our award-winning Twin Frozr coolers further by solving any and all reliability questions of the running of our fans... hence more gel.

Unlike our competitors, our bearing is made from a special ring made from a mixture of pressed cooper shavings and oil – This unique design avoids the need of ball bearings so the fan can run quieter.

Those customers with Graphics Cards pre-January that are worrying about oil leaking in the future causing harm to the fans.. don't worry. The oil leaking is from the fans hub and not from the bearing, thus will not impact the lifetime running of the fans.

Is it safe?
Yes. The gel which has since turned into an oil like substance during high heat conditions will not harm you, nor your surrounding components in your PC. This gel is harmless, it is non-conductive and will not harm components on the motherboard – The gel is designed to work up to 140C so it will not burn out.

What do I do now?
As mentioned, HQ knows about the problems you have been experiencing and recommends you RMA your Graphics Card to our RMA centre for a replacement card with the new fixes.

Can you not just send some replacement fans or coolers?
No. While there are 0 issues with the PCB's, we cannot send you replacement fans and/or Twin Frozr coolers to do it yourself. One reason is we want to ensure you do not damage the PCB or cooler during installation (and thus voiding your warranty), but another reason is due to how we design the Twin Frozr coolers. You may not know this, but unlike many of our competitors who simply use the same cooler for every batch of cards, we engineer our coolers differently per each graphics card to ensure each cooler we place onto each GPU can handle the thermals produced from that very GPU since every GPU is different (silicone lottery).

We are very sorry if you have been affected by this issue. We hold our hands up, however we did have good intentions. Please RMA the Graphics Card back to us for a swift replacement.

 

[Leyawiin]

Excellent - thanks very much for that informative post.

 

[frowertr]

I have several of the MSI 280X cards that I use for mining and they all leak. There were all pre-January.

I do call BS on it is because the fans are running at 100%. The fans on all my cards stay below 60%. They just engineered the damn hole too big in my opinion...

 

[Attic]

The fans shouldn't leak. Looks like they fixed it after blaming it on mining, which was a cop out.

Despite the claims and side stepping from the MSI rep, I noticed the leaking issue on my MSI 270 Gaming card under Gaming loads, not Mining loads. I had one other MSI 270 show the issue under mining loads, though I don't run my cards flat out.

In total I own 7 of the MSI R9 gaming line, 270/270x/280x. Only noted the issue on the 270 non x on 2 of 5 cards.

The HSF on the 270 is noticeably/significantly weaker than on the 270x or 280x so the fans in my situation were probably spinning harder to keep a desired temp on the 270s than on the 270x/280x's.

Beyond that the TFIV is an awsome cooler, but there was also an issue on a run of MSI 280x gaming where the cards ran very very hot due to high default vcore. The fun in this particular case was that MSI had Voltage Locked this series of cards! No flashing, no MSI AB support. The newest AB fixed it, but in my case I had to do a work around to lower vcore and the adjustment was limited and a PITA to track down and implement vs every other way of adjusting volts including BIOS flashing.

The 290/x line had an issue where the contact of the HSF onto the GPU was just a copy of the 780 series and so there was heatpipes that had no direct contact on the GPU in the case of the 290/x cards....

So i'd avoid MSI this round unless you dig pretty good on your particular model and have a lot of confidence there's no dumb MSI issues going on with it. ASUS/Powercolor/Sapphire non super basic models are what i'd recommend.


MSI's recent efforts on GPU's doesn't scream quality or care,.. more of just going through the motions. Shame because the TFIV is nice, just that MSI dropped the ball in the late stages of the game here.