PSU fan seems lazy

[The Bakery]

Hello PSU forum.

Firing up my computer this morning, there arose a roar. It sounded
like a fan with bad bearings.

I stopped each operating fan with my finger until I could determine it
was my PSU. I tapped the PSU a couple times and the fan stopped it's
noise entirely.

However, watching the fan after restart now, it seems lazy.

It spins on for a fraction of a second then stops. Then it spins up, and
slows down, then spins up more, slows down.

It repeats this until it reaches appropriate RPM then has no issues until
another restart.

I've since given it a good canned airing and it will not repeat the noise.

It's a Fortron FSP400 and it's about 3 years old. My primary concern is
that it will stop spinning when I'm not paying attention, overheat, and
cause damage to my components.

I never watched it spin up before so I can't verify that it hasn't done this
from day one and it was just hitting an internal wire - or that it was dirty.

Any thoughts?

 

[jonnyGURU]

Any time a fan doesn't spin normally, even if it starts to spin normally after some nudging or canned air, that fan is done. It can and probably will stop on you when you least expect it. If it's three years old (clearly older than your CPU and graphics card) it's really time to replace the PSU. Who knows how much life is in the caps too.

For the record, an FSP 400's fan ramps up speed going from cold to hot. It does NOT come to a stop unless the PC is actually OFF.

 

[The Bakery]

Indeed.

I guess this gives me an excuse to use my laptop until the new PSU arrives.

Thanks!

 

[VirtualLarry]

On my thermaltake 430W PSUs (both of them, I think), the fan barely spins at all. I'm surprised and amazed by that. On my SuperFlower 520W, the PSU fan in back spins up pretty well. I wish I could get the ThermalTake PSU fans to spin up to something normal, I think it would keep the PSU cooler.