G706 - Fan troubleshooting

JonN

I purchased a G706 a couple of weeks ago and it has worked great except for fan noise.  There are four fans (two on the cooling system and two in the case) and one was making a humming noise at times and is now making a clicking noise.  It does not always do it and kind of comes and goes.  What is the best way to troubleshoot which one as they are all close enough together that it is hard to tell which one is making the noise?

PowerSpec_MichaelB

Welcome back to the community forum, @JonN. Sorry to hear your having an issue with your G706.  Luckily there are some steps we can perform to help isolate the failing fan. Let's start by adjusting the fan speed of each fan header one by one. This should allow us to determine which fan is clicking by forcing it to run at full speed (making the clicking more audible) or forcing it to run quietly (listening  for the clicking to go away). Here is a simple guide on how to adjust your fan settings on systems equipped with ASRock motherboards: https://www.microcenter.com/tech_center/article/11288/how-to-adjust-fan-speed-on-desktops-equipped-with-asrock-motherboards

The BIOS will already have the fan header settings labeled to correspond with the fan header labels on the motherboard, so it will be pretty easy to trace the fan header to the failing fan. Regardless of which fan is failing, we'd be more than happy to replace that for you to save you the trouble. 

JonN

Thank you for the quick response as always. I tried what you asked and here are the results when I put each one on high for around a minute.  I also check to make sure the RPM's increased and they did on each of them.

CPU Fan 1 - much louder but not the noise I am hearing
CPU Fan 2 - ran very quiet at full speed
Chassis Fan 1 - ran very quiet at full speed
Chassis Fan 2 - ran very quiet at full speed
SB fan - ran very quiet at full speed. 

What is the SB fan as the only other fans besides the two CPU fans and Chassis fans are the fans on the NVidia 2070 super and Power supply fan?   I will say the noise only happens when I am gaming although I don't think that narrows anything down much.   Can you test the GPU fans?  Can I run the CPU fan 1 on silent, boot up and run a game to test that?  My apologies for all the questions.  

PowerSpec_MichaelB

No worries, these are all great questions. The SB fan is the fan that cools the chipset of the motherboard. It stands for Southbridge, though that nomenclature is pretty outdated these days. I've highlighted the chipset fan area as well as it's corresponding header to help illustrate what that setting is adjusting.


The fact that you are not hearing the motor/bearing noise when running those at full speed leaves me to lean towards the GPU fan. As for whether or not we can test them, we absolutely can thanks to third party software like MSI Afterburner. This article is a little outdated, but sadly I didn't write one myself as of yet: https://www.pcgamer.com/how-to-customize-gpu-cooling-using-msi-afterburner/. This should still convey how to adjust your GPU fan speeds, I'll work on creating a more up to date and in-depth article here for our community.

To download MSI afterburner, visit the following webpage and scroll to the bottom of the page: https://www.msi.com/page/afterburner. This will allow you to adjust your fan speed without getting in a game, and should let you know very quickly if any of the GPU fans are at fault.

Lastly, you can definitely run your CPU fan speed on silent while testing the other fans. The cooling solution in the G706 is quite overkill, so I doubt you'll see much of a difference compared to silent and regular speed. The 3700X is very power efficient, so it doesn't get all that hot unless you are putting it through some stressful instruction sets.

Keep us in the loop on what you find, and we'll do our best to assist from there. If you have any questions in the mean time, let us know!

JonN

Thank you, that makes perfect sense regarding the SB fan.  I used MSI Afterburner to increase the GPU fan speed to as high as I could.  It was loud but I did not hear the noise I have been hearing.   That does sound like the fan noise I hear for just a few seconds when I start up the computer but that noise goes away quickly and is not a bother.  I changed the CPU Fan 1 to silent so it runs at about 900 RPM's instead of the standard 1230 or so RPM's.  I have been running Destiny 2 for about 25 minutes and I have not heard the noise at all.  It's actually much more quiet overall now.  I will keep testing and let you know if that changes.  Can you replace the CPU 1 fan only even though it is part of the Cooler Master unit or do you have to replace the entire Cooler Master unit?

PowerSpec_MichaelB

JonN said:

Thank you, that makes perfect sense regarding the SB fan.  I used MSI Afterburner to increase the GPU fan speed to as high as I could.  It was loud but I did not hear the noise I have been hearing.   That does sound like the fan noise I hear for just a few seconds when I start up the computer but that noise goes away quickly and is not a bother.  I changed the CPU Fan 1 to silent so it runs at about 900 RPM's instead of the standard 1230 or so RPM's.  I have been running Destiny 2 for about 25 minutes and I have not heard the noise at all.  It's actually much more quiet overall now.  I will keep testing and let you know if that changes.  Can you replace the CPU 1 fan only even though it is part of the Cooler Master unit or do you have to replace the entire Cooler Master unit?

The fan is pretty easy to remove, though I suppose this would depend on the preference of the technician performing the repair. If it were me, I'd rather remove just the fan as it would save me time from having to remove the CPU block, repaste it, and re-attach the block, but I am sure everyone has their own methods to performing this kind of repair.