So this is the first time (for about the past week) that I've heard my mobo's fan making a pretty noticable noise. Upon inspection it seems like the fan is spinning, slowing down, speeding up, slowing down..etc... Not sure what to do (and whether or not to start panicing).

The system is a Gigabye GA-7VAX with the KT400 chipset. The fan is directly on the chipset so I definately don't want this baby to die. Any ideas?

Replace it immediately with a quality-fan before your mobo fries.

Your mobo won't die without a chipset fan. Maybe you will be getting random crashes when system is under heavy load. It may work fine without a fan, relying on the heatsink only. Just take the fan off and see what happens. You won't be doing any overclocking with that quiet mobo tho.

Or you can get a Zalman Passive Heatsink for Chipsets such as this one :



The contact surface of the zalman heatsink is slightly smaller then the Northbridge surface so you have to make sure they make very good contact.

Do you have anything in mind? Just to make sure, it's not the power supply right? I only have a 300watt supply, everything else is working (4 fans installed all working properly). That one thing looks a little to big hehe so I'm open to suggestions.

It's not that much bigger then a standard Northbridge heatsink.

See that's weird, I don't even have a heatsink on the chipset. I'm guessing they (motherboard companies) don't go all out and give you that huh? Would it be better to just put on a heatsink instead of the tiny fan they have running on it?

Also, it's not too difficult to put on right?
I'm a bumbling fool when it comes to tiny parts.

Here's the product page ( ZM-NB47J ) & here's a little Flash animation showing how to install it.

If you follow those instructions closely, you won't have any problems.

Looks simple enough, I just need to uninstall the fan that came with it. I'm assuming there's a very little chance of it not being compatible with my mobo?

Thanks again Didou for the help.

That heatsink was designed to make sure it wouldn't have problems with capacitors around the Northbridge are ( if there are any ).

It's a bit "tall" but not very large so you shouldn't have much if any compatibility problems with your board, just remember to make sure the surface contact area is ideal.