[Joeaksa]

Gents,

Am pretty good with computers but this one has me scratching my head.

Have a Dell desktop, about 2-3 years old. Been running like a charm, in fact its been on and running about 99% of the time I have owned it.

Started freezing up yesterday. Had an idea that it was getting warm inside so opened it up and put a external fan blowing into the unit. Worked fine. Then installed some motherboard monitoring software and yep, one of the video cards is getting hot and shutting things down.

Head to Fry's for a new fan. Its a standard 92mm version but the new one has a high, medium and low switch and loads of ball bearings.

Put it in on the motherboard connector and turn the switch on high. Boot the computer and fan works great for a couple of seconds then reverts to low speed. Chit! Temps go right back up into the red. I plug the fan into an extra computer power supply I have and it runs nice and fast when I do this.

This fan plugs onto the motherboard with a small three pin connector. Am guessing that something on the MB or BIOS is telling the thing to run slow when we really need it on high.

Anyone ever encountered this and whats a work around? Problem is that this computer has SATA connections on the power supply, otherwise I would hook the fan up directly there.

Ideas?

Thx,

Joe A