[SOLVED] Fan twitch

[TM1172]

I’m using an MSI GTX 950 2GD5 OVC (the one with the single 87mm cooling fan) and yesterday, running a fairly GPU-intensive game, I noticed that the fan was not spinning and the GPU temps were screaming towards 90. I shut down the machine and tried a few boot cycles, during which I noticed that the GPU fan “twitched” a few times at startup - the blades repeatedly moved a half an inch, but then stopped. If I moved the fan by hand in the direction it was trying to turn, the fan would keep spinning. If I stopped the blades by hand, the fan wouldn’t be able to start spinning again by itself. It would just twitch again. The fan also didn’t seem to speed up or slow down based on what I see in MSI Afterburner, even though the speed in GPU-Z matched what I set in Afterburner.
Is the fan bad? Is the card going bad? It seems like if it were related to an eco mode on the fan below 60 degrees, the fan wouldn’t twitch and then give up.

 

[jay32267]

I would replace the fan.
The GPU is obviously supplying voltage to the fan which means that the GPU wants the fan spinning.
You also saw temps heading towards 90C with the fan not spinning which is further evidence IMO that the fan needs to be spinning at this point.

 

[TM1172]

Thanks Jay. I ordered a replacement, hope it arrives soon. In this case, do you think that the fan failing would also cause the card to not cool correctly with it running? By that, I mean - the fan is spinning now, because I spun it by hand. However, it just went out of temp limits while running Witcher 3 and started to crash - would the fan going bad mean it no longer responds to voltage from the GPU telling it to spin faster?