Unplugging video card fans bad?

[shatter]

I have a leadtek A250 Geforce Ti4400 video card in my sage box running Windows XP. I use a PVR-350 for video capture and displaying of PVR'd video. I use the Leaktek card for playing DVDs, using MAME and surfing the web on the TV.

My question is, can I unplug the fans on the video card without it going up in smoke? It is noisy as heck and I can't take it any more!!! Pictures of the twin-fan mega heatsink card is shown below.

Front

Back

[stanger89]

I'd say unplugging the fans is very dangerous, they're there for a reason, and I generally don't like to second guess the engineers.

However you could replace the entire heatsink/fan with a silent one:
http://www.zalman.co.kr/eng/product/...x=138&code=013

[edgley]

You can slow them down, and lose noise from them that way.

If you slow them down too much (and the card starts to get to hot) you will see indicators in the video picture.

Or the PC will hang! If this does happen, turn up the speed of the fans.

I have slowed the fan down on my VGA card as it was the last part of my system that was too noisy, and now it is much better.

[JasonJoel]

There is no one answer for this.

On my Geforce3 based video card, I WAS able to unplug the fan and the unit remain stable. But it is also fairly low clock speed, etc. On my Geforce4 video card I could not, overheated and locked up (not to mention it felt like it was a furnace, and probably would have damaged the card.. heh).

On the behemoth you have I would almost guarantee you shouldn't! But that is my $0.02.

Jason

[shatter]

Thanks for the replies everyone.. I appreciate the thoughtful comments. I think I will just go out and buy a fx5200 based card which uses a heatsink only to get around the issue.

[dagar]

If it's running 2D you're ok ... not so with VRM9.