Shuriken Rev. B fan problem

[Viegas]

Hi,

I got a new PC with a Scythe Shuriken Rev. B three/four months ago.
Every was going well, until a few days ago when I arrived from a trip and saw that my PC was turned off.
I didn't pay much attention to it but have since seen it happen a few times - the PC turns off because of overheating.

I monitored the situation and have found that the fan on the CPU cooler appears to not be working very well.
I disabled Q-Fan in the BIOS; I have found that if I leave the PC turned off for some time, I turn it on and the fan is at ~2000 rpm. The fan's RPM progressively decline throughout time. After about three hours, it is at ~1000 rpm and after one or two more its at such a low rpm speed that the CPU overheats.
The speed of my chassis fan is constantly between 980 - 1020 rpm throughout the whole process.

Any ideas on how to debug the problem further and What I can do to solve this problem?

Thank you.

Best regards,
Viegas

[Oli]

Debug: Connect the fan directly to the PSU. It should run with 12V / full speed now. Does the rpm still decrease (which should be audible due to the rather big difference between 2000 and less than 1000 rpm)?

If yes the fan is definitely not ok. However if Q-FAN is off the fan should nevertheless run with the same constant rpm when connected to the board. Probably the Asus BIOS has errors causing the PWM fan of Shuriken being regulated although Q-FAN is off.

When Q-FAN is activated the fan should operate within these specs:
650±200 upm ~ 2200 upm (±10%)

[Viegas]

Hi Oli,

First of all, thanks for your very quick reply.

As for your suggestion, I don't seem to have any way to connect the small 4 pin fan connector directly to anything on the PSU. What I will try to do is replace the Shuriken with the stock AMD cooler and check how the temperature and fan rpm is with that.

By the way, everything was working correctly up to a few days ago (and I've always had quiet-fan turned on, I just turned it off now due to the problem).

Cheers,
Viegas

[Oli]

You can connect the 4-pin PWM plug to an other 3-pin fan header on your mainboard. It'll then also run full speed.

[Viegas]

Hi,

Just an update on the situation: I replaced the shuriken with AMD's cooler/fan and it has been working correctly for the past ~20 hours (still running without the quiet fan option). Fan rpm has been a steady 3650-3850 rpm (which includes quite a lot of noise! ), and the CPUs temperature has been extremely stable.
Oli, I will connect the shuriken to a 3pin connector to check it out. In any case, at this point, it does seem the shuriken's fan has a problem.

Cheers,
Viegas

[Oli]

Then you'll need to get in direct contact with Scythe support. The procedure differs depending of where you come from and where you bought the unit.

[burtp]

Just replaced the stock CPU cooler in my HP Athlon II pc with a Shuriken. HP motherboard only has 3 pin fan header but it's keyed so I plugged in Shuriken appropriately. CPU fan tries to spin up at boot but does not. That is, you can see it move a bit but then stops. System shuts down about 10-15 seconds later. I plugged fan connector in case fan header with the same result. Any ideas what is going on here? Std case fan works in both headers as does std CPU cooler fan. Both std fans seem to be 0.19A while Shurien fan is 0.24A. Does the Shuriken fan take too much power at startup? This is not a performance system. Just an vanilla desktop, motherboard video and Nexus 430W power supply that I just added.

Thank you.

Burt

HP motherboard is M2N68-LA (some off brand Chinese company)

[Oli]

My first guess would be that the fan of your cooler is dead on arrival.

If you get a replacement you should really think about regulating the fan speed with a controller like Fan Mate 2. When the 4-pin PWM fan of Shuriken is connected to a 3-pin connector it will always run full speed if the board manufacturer didn't implement a working speed control.

You'll have to test this. Shuriken's fan at max speed won't be a pleasure (= loud!).