My son has my family’s oldest gaming PC, it’s an i7 4790 with a 1660 TI and 16GB DDR3. It wasn’t booting the last couple of days. I had time to look at it so we disconnected everything and threw it on the table with some good light and connected it to power so I could see what it was doing.
It was clear his three case fans were all dying, one was completely dead. One was in poor condition and one was starting to make noise. I already had extra case fans brand new in box sitting in my house, but I assumed old fans weren’t what was keeping it from booting.
We removed all three bad fans, and with the case wide open, both sides front and top removed, I blew it out a little bit with canned air. It wasn’t that dirty, just a little bit of dust came out. I checked with my fingers to see that the ram seemed seated and that all the connections seemed okay, but I didn’t disconnect and reconnect anything, I just touched it.
I turned on the PC with no case fans (only an old CPU cooler connected) and it booted up. So we installed the three new case fans, and tested it again. It booted up again. We put it all back together and connected all the peripherals and it’s working absolutely flawlessly.
So I am asking a question, but I want you for context to know that I have repaired hundreds of PCs, maybe close to a thousand. I have never fixed a boot issue by replacing case fans. I have read that some 20+ year-old PCs maybe would have that issue, but from what I understand a 12-year-old PC should not have boot impacted by case fans. So here’s my question: was this just a ghost in the system, or is this actually possibly a real thing?
TL:DR We fixed his computer with three new case fans and the tiniest bit of canned air. Help me make it make sense.
Thanks for the response. I’m not trained in PC repair nor is it my job but I’m pretty good at it which is why I’ve done tons of free PC work for non-profits and a little bit of side jobs fixing or building PCs for people I know.
I actually don’t know where they were plugged in,but my son does. I was trying to teach him a bit so as I removed the screws from the fans at the front and pulled on each cable so he knew which one to unplug, he actually disconnected the old and then later reconnected the new fans, not me. I made sure he paid close attention to the pin locations, so he can probably tell me when I get home. In theory though, modern PCs should be able to boot with no CPU cooler, they’ll shut down quickly when they get hot though. I’ll look into this.
Yeah I mentioned that in my other comment. I always test boot my new builds while outside the case with just the CPU installed. I like to make sure it’s posting each time I add new hardware so I can know before I put it all in the case that something is wrong. I have never had a board refuse to post without a cooler or fans connected, but they will give warnings out the wazoo though.