Ati 3600 series

Greetings

Just a quick question. I have an ati 3650 video card and the fan does not seem to be running. Is it supposed to run continuously or switch on and off? I noticed some issues when running some games on high graphics settings that never had issues before, the first thing I checked was heat/fans/dust.

Thanks in advance for your help.

very few cards have been designed to turn their fans off at any given time, and the few that have...would spin back up when the system is no longer idle - such as when you start playing games and your temperatures rise above a certain limit. But most cards will simply spin at a lower speed during 2D/light load and a higher speed during 3D/high load.

if your fan is not spinning, my assumption would be that the fan is dead, or enough junk has gotten into the heatsink/fan to block it up. So you have a few options, first is to continue cleaning the card and hope you can get that fan going again, replace the heatsink, or RMA the card to the manufacturer and get a replacement. Cleaning the card is your easiest option as you can simply pop the card out and give it a blast of compressed air and maybe oil up the bearings. Replacing the heatsink will cost you upwards of $20 or so, but means you will get a more reliable cooling solution that does a better job than the basic one on the card. But do note that replacing the heatsink can be a bit of a chore if you have never done it before. An exposed GPU die is fairly delicate and if you are too aggressive you risk chipping the core which renders your card a paperweight. Not to discourage you, but you do want to be careful. And RMAing the card..well that just means you ship it off to the manufacturer, which might take a week or so, and a week or so following that they will send you back the repaired card or a replacement.