Motherboard fan question

[root]

New motherboards often have a small fan covering one
of the bridge chips. Likewise, expensive graphics
cards have a fan on their processor. These fans
are cheaply made.

Is there protection for the MB/card to keep their
chips from frying if the tiny little fan fails?

TIA

 

[Meat Plow]

New motherboards often have a small fan covering one of the bridge
chips. Likewise, expensive graphics cards have a fan on their processor.
These fans are cheaply made.

Is there protection for the MB/card to keep their chips from frying if
the tiny little fan fails?

No.

 

[Meat Plow]

No.

I'll revise that and say that if said fan is monitored then there can be
an audible alert set up if the fan drops below a certain RPM. The fan
would need to have three wires to be monitored. Also in BIOS there should
be a setting to alert if the mainboard goes over a set temperature limit.
The default limits are usually good enough to use.

 

[ian field]

I'll revise that and say that if said fan is monitored then there can be
an audible alert set up if the fan drops below a certain RPM. The fan
would need to have three wires to be monitored. Also in BIOS there should
be a setting to alert if the mainboard goes over a set temperature limit.
The default limits are usually good enough to use.

Some motherboards have thermistors mounted under various chips and software
included on the setup disk with temp monitor and alarm.

I think my other PC has it, but its not obvious - I'd have to re-run the
setup disk to find out where it is.

Either that or I didn't bother with it last time I did a clean install.

 

[Meat Plow]

Some motherboards have thermistors mounted under various chips and
software included on the setup disk with temp monitor and alarm.

I think my other PC has it, but its not obvious - I'd have to re-run
the setup disk to find out where it is.

Either that or I didn't bother with it last time I did a clean install.

often,before anything fries,you start seeing wierd
things,glitches,freezes,etc.

maybe you could/should build a temp monitoring system,separate from the
PC circuitry,with red LED's that flash when a zone goes overtemp,and
voices "warning,warning" in a robotic voice ala Lost in Space.(use a
speech chip from a greeting card...)
it could even kick in an emergency backup fan,and perhaps even a freeze
spray blast to chill things down.

[end "humor" mode]

Ummm not to spoil your humor however, there is/was a PCI card and front
panel that did just that. Designed for those who used to overclock their
systems and run them on the ragged edge.

 

[Meat Plow]

I've yet to see a motherboard that did anything with the chipset fan
speed data. You can run an application that'll monitor it, but almost
nobody goes to the bother as most such applications, written for
microsoft windows, were modeled to resemble someting out of a comic book
and are an eyesore even when minimized. Linux' lmsensors doesn't
require such an eyesore on the desktop, but is a bit of a PITA to set
up.

The better motherboards either use a quality fan or a heatpipe to a
heatsink cooled by the cpu fan.

For the most part decent mainboard provide enough surface area to their
Northbridge chipset and onboard video to be passively cooled. The extreme
end boards offer heatpipes and fancy servo fans.

 

[Sylvia Else]

New motherboards often have a small fan covering one
of the bridge chips. Likewise, expensive graphics
cards have a fan on their processor. These fans
are cheaply made.

Is there protection for the MB/card to keep their
chips from frying if the tiny little fan fails?

TIA

I have a fanless NVIDIA based graphics card that I was running with
inadequate ventilation. When used on graphics intensive tasks, it
started behaving as if there was increasing fog in the scene being
viewed. This would have reduced the amount of processing it needed to
do. The GPU didn't fail, and this effect was apparently invisible to the
software driving it. I infer that it was a designed response to excess
temperature.

A fan cooled version with a failing fan would presumably do the same thing.

Sylvia.

 

[PeterD]

I'll revise that and say that if said fan is monitored then there can be
an audible alert set up if the fan drops below a certain RPM. The fan
would need to have three wires to be monitored.

Not necessarily true. THe chipset could easily have an
over-temperature detection circuit built into the die. At least that's
how I'd do it, since that would detect multiple problems that
monitoring just the fan's rotation would not do. After all, a fan
turning is not always a fan delivering power!

 

[Meat Plow]

Not necessarily true. THe chipset could easily have an over-temperature
detection circuit built into the die. At least that's how I'd do it,

<snip>

No of course it's not necessarily true. I can't speak for every frigging
manufacturer out there. Certainly both cases are true, MB temperature
monitors and monitored fans and both. My MSI MB has a monitored rear
120mm fan and MB temperature monitoring. Most of the boards I've dealt
with are Intel, Asus, and MSI. I can only recall one using a small fan on
the pci bridge chip. The rest were equipped with a large heat sink. The
emphasis on using one large fan in the rear to quietly exhaust inside air
rather than having a bunch of small 5000 rpm fans making a racket.

 

[Sofa Slug]

New motherboards often have a small fan covering one
of the bridge chips. Likewise, expensive graphics
cards have a fan on their processor. These fans
are cheaply made.

Is there protection for the MB/card to keep their
chips from frying if the tiny little fan fails?

TIA

There is a cheap "Fan Alarm System" card available:
http://www.outletpc.com/c1685.html