Loud Fan...Cleaned it...What Else?

[nullqwerty]

Hey folks,

Got an old P4 3.0 ghz HP lying around. Used to be silent. Out of nowhere it sounded like a jet engine pretty much constantly.

So, opened it up. Pretty dusty. Cleaned it out with compressed air. The compressed air wasn't doing the trick on the cpu fan/heat sink though. So I removed the fan and cleaned it manually. Then (with the heat sink still attached) I used a vacuum and cleaned the heat sink (yes...know all the risks with that...went for it anyway). After that, they were both seemingly dust free.

Turned it back on...same deal. Loud as heck. I then tried replacing the PSU with one that is silent on another pc in my house. Same deal though, ruling out the PSU as the problem. The case fan is clean also.

So, what's the deal? Everything is clean now. Do CPU fans sometimes just get loud? My feeling is that it's fine but is spinning on high because the CPU is getting hot. But why would it be getting hot? My room is 60 degrees. Lots of airflow. Heat sink was just cleaned. What could it be?

Any ideas?

Thanks

 

[o1die]

Check for a cracked fan blade or frame piece. Sometimes they're hard to spot.