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Tis half-past pumpkin-hour, & i'm about to go beddybyes, after a day that did not go anything like i had expected. All plans went out the window Sat morn when during the beginning of my day's pooterising, i suddenly noticed via my Plasma desktop widget, & my , that the cpu temperature was ~30-40 deg C hotter than normal, & the reason was that its cooling fan was stopped. Bummer.

I immediately put pooter to sleep, to cool down, whilst i planned my actions. Once ready, i woke her up again, inserted my USB stick on which i do my weekly [Sunday] backups, & ran a backup a day early, whilst i nervously watched the temperature. Then fully shutdown, waiting for Sunday when i shall attempt to inspect the fan to see if it's buggered, or [hopefully] just gummed up with dust that i can clean out.

However, i have various things i need to do online [bills & stuff], so coz atm the prognosis for pooter is uncertain, i chose to plan on a worst-case scenario where she's unavailable for days or weeks. Hence, the rest of today was spent getting out my venerable old 2011 lappy, doing the backlog of [ ] updates, transferring all my pooter's backed-up data from stick to lappy's SSD, then re-customising all my main app settings to get the form & function more or less the same as i have on my pooter. I really can't quite believe all the hours this cumulative process has taken, OMZ.

Not whingeing, just quite tired now, & still a bit discombobulated.

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Yay, pooter now happy again.

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All this gobbledegook is on the dodgy cooling fan's centre hub face:

  • Intel
  • E97378-001
  • CNSH4492M4
  • F90T12NS1B7-64A01C1
  • DC12V 0.28A
  • NIDEC

Otoh this cpu info is on my 2015 Invoice for once-happy now-sad pooter:

  • CPU Intel Core i7-4790 3.6Ghz 8Mb Cache S1150

Methinks i'll begin feeding the latter info into my search engine, & use the basically unintelligible-to-me [except its first & fifth lines] former info to hopefully corroborate any hits, if necessary.

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Initial results rather dispiriting. I need only the new fan & motor, not the heatsink too, but so far all results i've found for apparently right model are for the complete combo. Any bare fans/motors so far are all the wrong models. Additional irritant; heaps of results are for Amazon listings, & i will never under any circumstances support that terrible company.

Shall go & sulk over dinner & movie, then resume later. Sigh.

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Well, have sat on this for several days, hoping for a better idea to hit me, in order to avoid having to buy the single local option available whose price is clearly a monumental rip-off. Assuming still no better 💡 by post-dinner tonight, i shall just have to swallow my annoyance, hold my nose, & allow myself to be ripped-off, otherwise, still no working pooter. Sigh.

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Pooter running again now; system pkgs updates done, data copied back from Lappy to Pooter, so far all seems ok... but i remain apprehensive til further notice.

Vendor has, i feel, stiffed me a bit. The unit i ordered was accompanied online by a picture unambiguously showing it was a 0.6 amp job. The one that was delivered today is a 0.2 amp job. The original one, now dodgy, is 0.28 amp, so not only did i not get what i wanted, it's not even as powerful as my original. Furthermore, the actual heatsink item has slightly fewer fins, spaced slightly further apart, than my original. Both facts together make me suspect this unit might be intended for an Intel LGA 1150 i3 cpu, whereas mine is Intel LGA 1150 i7. The vendor's site had the facility to select the appropriate motherboard cpu socket type, eg, LGA 1150, LGA 1151, LGA 1155, LGA 1200 etc, but no facility to specify i3, i5, i7, i9 etc. That is, a dodgy web design by accident or design, & i seem to have fallen into the trap.

I thought about ringing the vendor & chucking a tanty, but realised it would not help ofc, & anyway my hands are tied. Best case scenario would have been vendor apologised & offered to replace it with what i actually ordered, but... natch they'd need me to send the received one back to them. I can't do that... i can order stuff online & have it delivered here, but every time i do it [over the last 22 years i've been doing so], i accept i'm gambling, coz if items are defective or wrong, i just have to grin & bear it... coz i can't get myself to a post office to do the necessary stuff for returns. Sigh, being fucked in the head is such fun.

Given the preceding, i decided i had nothing to lose by bunging this new unit into Pooter & giving it a go. If it can't adequately control the cpu temperature & i have to again shutdown & revert to Lappy to plan my next steps, then so be it.

So far, it is holding the temp well [26 C], but i can see it is doing so by running ~1000 rpm faster than the old one would have [~2600 rpm atm, with only browser, Thunderbird, GnuCash, KeePassXC, Goodvibes, text editor open, & thus low load]. Even when i ran a full system update the temp only peaked at ~45 C, which is actually good.

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

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@MsDropbear42 That's good news. 😃

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@captainb Yes, i am quite relieved... & also pleased to be able once more to use my "proper" pooter [tower], even though i'm ofc grateful to Lappy for being my backstop option during the "excitement", ergonomically & pragmatically my tower with lotsa RAM & the external monitor is just far nicer to use for long periods compared to cramming myself together for Lappy. However, i shan't look a gift horse in the mouth; even though Lappy is very old now, i am very privileged to have at least been able to keep doing my online stuff whilst sorting out the fixing-up of the tower, otherwise i'd have been offline all that time [which would have been very inconvenient for bills-paying etc].

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@captainb Sigh, pooter now sad again. Looks like fan motor is actually cactus after all, not just that the blades & cooling fins had been choked up with dust & lint [which they certainly were, but not now]. Need to suss out fan assembly details then procure replacement.

Worse things happen at sea... & in numerous countries atm sadly... but this is still a bit of a nuisance.

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@MsDropbear42 Not sure whether it helps:

DuckDuckGo for Intel E97378-001 fan:

newegg.com/global/au-en/intel-

"Will work for any socket 1200, 115x etc."

Okay:

computers.scorptec.com.au/comp

There are more options.. May they fit?

Scorptec (around the corner here in South Melbourne) has people who know stuff.. Maybe just call them.

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@petros Ta. The problem is that vendors are being extremely loose with the truth. The same silhouette comprises multiple discrete part numbers, of varying amperage. Mine is 12V 0.28A, which sadly has proven to be difficult to replace. Other silhouette stable-mates of very similar but different part nos are 0.18, 0.20, & 0.60 amps; these ones are all over the internet. Many vendors have advertised my exact p/n, & it's not til i zoom in on the pictures to read the ID spec info that i see they're one of the other amp ratings.

scorptec.com.au is one of the many vendor sites i'd already searched, & drawn a blank. Ta anyway.

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@MsDropbear42 I discussed it with my colleagues.

0.28 A is the current your particular fan will draw and how much power it will use (12Vx0.28A is a bit more than 4 Watt).

But it is not a defining feature in a way that you need exactly 0.28A. Others will do.

Similar as at home - you can put a 40 W lamp into a socket but 75 is fine as well - as long as the fuse isn't coming off. 4 or 5 W shouldn't be critical given that a computer has a few hundred W power supplies.

That's what we think here..

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@MsDropbear42 12V x 0.28A is a bit more than 3 VA.. My mathematics need coffee.

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@petros Well now, that is most interesting, thank you! My pooter's PS is 700W, so i knew that was not a relevant limiting factor here, but the single reason for my conservative decision to replace with an exact match is that i know nothing about the current rating of the rest of that part of the circuit. In other words, whilst i knew i did not want to buy either the 0.18 or 0.20 A options for fear of inadequate cooling from their lower power than mine, my temptation for the 0.60 A option [with implied possibility of better cooling due to its higher power] was countermanded by my anxiety / uncertainty over whether the rest of my existing cpu cooling fan circuit was safe with the extra amperage.

Maybe i'm being ridiculous, & 0.60 A would be perfectly safe? 🤔🤷‍♀️

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@petros Consider yourself virtually hugged, with gratitude. You've now tremendously opened up my range of vendor options. Tonight i shall repeat my earlier searches, but this time not excluding all the many [iirc] 0.60 A ones. 🤗🤗🤗

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@MsDropbear42 No problem, my pleasure.

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@MsDropbear42

All I can suggest is a hammer ... Hugz

Hugz & xXx

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@MelissaBearTrix Wait, wait, wait, now i'm confused. You mean to say... not only are you our resident expert on shovels, but you've branched out also into hammers? Sheep bladders!

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@MsDropbear42

Yep it's my side line ... Giggles

Little 1/2 Oz all the way up to a 10 pounder ... Even some with pointy edges ... Giggles

Hugz & xXx

P.S and spades too ... Giggles

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@MelissaBearTrix phwoarrrr!

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@MsDropbear42
Where did you end up ordering your parts from?

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@AdminKirsty Oh it was just some scummy eBay mob, somewhere in Straya. No doubt by next week they'll have shut up shop then reopened with some other generic name. Who me, cynical? 🤔🤷‍♀️🤭