Chosen Solution

Basically I have an old Dell GX280 full-size desktop computer (it’s not the one in the picture on this site. It’s one which is made to sit up and not lay on it’s side), and recently I had bought a replacement motherboard for it since the old one’s capacitors were bulged and it wouldn’t boot, and the fan would go extremely fast. After installing the new motherboard, I noticed the computer CPU fan is going rather fast, and lots of air is being pushed out, and this is when it’s idle and not doing much of anything. I don’t have a hard drive in it right now, but I boot Lubuntu 16.04 from a live USB to use it. I’ve looked high and low on the internet for an answer, yet just about every person describes their problem as being “Extremely fast and loud fan, and no boot”. Mine boots, but goes faster than it should. Any ideas? Oh, and this isn’t my main computer. It’s just a spare which I’d like to make use of.

Hi, Try these suggestions:

  1. Try clearing CMOS using the ‘Clear CMOS’ jumper on the mainboard (You should see writing above the jumper block saying something like ‘CLR_CMOS’
  2. Update the BIOS (Download it from the Dell website)
  3. Try and swap the chassis fan & CPU fan connectors around.
  4. Load setup defaults in BIOS.
  5. If all this fails, you may have a faulty thermal sensor on the replacement board. Cheers, Michael.

The correct answer to your problem is to buy some Artic Silver Thermal compound and put it on the CPU processor and the heat-sink. Make sure that you first clean off the old thermal compound. Read the instructions on the thermal compound and you should be on your way to knowing how the thermal compound works. It takes several computer cycles for the thermal compound to take effect. If this answer was helpful in fixing your problem let me know by sending me a email to ranlove@yahoo.com Good Luck.