Just venting. Had video freeze issues past week; Tuesday morning found out that my card's fan no longer was turning (not even a year and half old). I had a USB powered fan that I put inside the case and it appeared to keep the card cool enough to work, but went ahead and ordered a new card Wednesday (like am early morning) and this card from ASUS does not have a fan to worry about messing up. lol

I actually got it in the mail today (barely more then 2 days; now that's what you call service from Tigerdirect). Uninstalled all the NVidia drivers and re-installed (probably same drivers though the card's a GT630 (previous one was a GT520). Not a gamer so left the tweaks to their default settings. Hoping my video freeze issues will now disappear. Just don't really feel like purchasing a new computer after dishing out buckoo bucks for my new car.

Video card fans are the worst. You might be able to replace the fan on that card or better yet, replace it with a large heat sink. I've done both on various cards. FeeBay is pretty good place to find both.

On my personal PC, I go with fanless video cards too. I've never had any luck with fans on video cards. They always die or make a heck of racket.

It's a good idea to open your case and clean the CPU fan & heat sink, case fans and PS fans, at least once per year.

dust is the killer on those fans. Over the years I have retired several desktop systems, strickly on laptops now so I keep a can of blow out close by. Engineer called me talking about his system locking up on him. I told him to take it to maintenance and i'll meet him there, we grabbed an airhose and I stuck the tip in the exhaust port and hit it, you should have seen the dust fly out of the intake and even out the keyboard! Blew it out back and forth a couple of times and we could hear the fan turn nice and free then.

Like Tux said, blow those things out from time to time.

Yeah; vacuumed it out 3 weeks ago (over a year and a half since I last did so). Yes, the dust was atrocious. Wonder if what I did then caused my video card to eventuall give out? Who really knows. Just happy that these new cards are backwards compatible with my very aging motherboard. lol

Definitely going to do my best to keep my video card fanless; not a gamer so don't really need uber heat management anyway; just a good heatsink and not the wimpy ones that come with usual video cards (where they then add a fan to make up for that).

On my previous PC I had a no-name NVidia card and I replaced the GPU fan with a Zalmann unit before even installing it in the PC. Not too noisy, and never had any problem with that.

Another overlooked area is the space between the CPU fan and the CPU heatsink.

Remove the fan from the heatsink and clean the area in between. Spraying and/or vacuuming usually won't get it. If not cleaned, that area can get a layer of dust over it that looks like a piece of felt. I've seen lots of PCs with overheating issues caused by this problem.

I didn't want to mess up the heatsink layer but I did reseat the heatsink Tux (because I noticed the CPU fan not spinning right for starters and yes, I got a Win7 BSOD which has been extremely rare up until this point). CPU fan didn't appear to have any obstructions but I again cleaned that area out too. I'm leaving the side of the PC case open (as we did at the shop when I was doing computer repair for a variety of reasons, but it does keep the inside cooler too) for now. Fan now appears to be turning as it should. We shall see I don't indeed have even more issues with my system. Might have to bite the bullet; looking at an AMD quad system with 16Gs RAM. I do want a solid state primary drive but also at least a T-Byte second drive for storing things and such. We shall see, but again, I hesitate spending even more money after buying a car and also, my job's not the most stable right now. Got pinch pennies, but I've been dishing out dollars of late. lol

I´ve been using 450 Silent since it was released, 2010 I recall. Before that 8600GTS.
Silence is golden. Cheaper and use less power. You don´t need a powerful card if You don´t play latest and greatest games.

Well more bad news. My CPU fan's also going cu-put. I waited over a year and a half before vacuuming out the case and 2 weeks later, things started failing on me. Got a few blue screens to boot too (which I never had with Win7 until the CPU fan started failing). Oh well; it's spinning now. Have an external fan blowing in the case too, but this is a stop gap. Probably won't be posting much until the fan comes in. Need to rest more anyway the next few days. If you don't see me post the next few days, that's why. If Tiger is like they were w/ my video card, I should get my CPU Fan no later then Tuesday. Crossing my fingers. At least I know now that my MB is not the issue. Just hope I didn't mess up the HD with all the BSODs. Will do a thorough CHKDSK once the new CPU/Heatsink is installed.

Well, the CPU heatsink/fan came in today. Can't believe how quiet my system is now (no more video card fan either; lol). The side's still off so when I put the side panel back on it will even be more quieter. The only sound I actually hear is the HD heads when it's accessing the Harddrive. lol

Now, because of the myriad of BSODs, I'm going to do a complete CHKDSK, so hopefully the power won't go off in the next 1.5 hours. lol