Problem with Arctic Silencer 5

[Dman877]

Just got a sapphire GTO2 and a Arctic Silencer 5 rev 2 for it. The silencer is nice and quiet but it makes a strange noise I've never heard before. The only way I can describe it is a mechanical burble. It sounds like the fan blades are just barely scraping something but they're not.

The wierd thing is this noise is independant of the fan speed. It runs at about 5 hz I'd say regardless of what percentage the fan is set to. I know its the arctic silencer though because if I unplug it, the sound is gone... The noise isn't very loud, if my other fans were turned up to normal levels I probably couldn't hear this.

Any suggestions? Is it RMA time?

TIA

 

[l0cke]

I had an ultra 80mm fan that sounded like that. i was gonna RMA but instead i peeled off the label and found some of the 'oil' gunk they used had hardened. I took it out and it wokred fine.

 

[Dman877]

Hmmm... guess I'll see if I can take this thing apart then. Thanks for sharing your experience.

 

[Dman877]

Seems it was related to the fan speed control on the video card. I tried oiling the fan (it didn't have any debris that I could see) but it still made the noise. After pulling it out and experimenting it seems that when powered directly by the psu the noise is gone. I have it hooked up to the psu now running at 7v which seems to be silent with decent airflow. I kind of liked being able to tweak the fan speed with atitool but I like not having to deal with the noise better.