2015 17R3 strange sound

My 2015 Alienware 17 R3 has begun making a strange sound when the CPU fan turns on. The sound is a strange clicking sound that reminds me of the sound of a child jumping on the bed (the sound the springs make). It is coming from the upper right side of the machine near the top of the numerical keypad, or at least whatever components are inside the machine under the numerical keypad. No other behavioral issues have presented themselves. I thought about the hard drive first thing, but it is pretty far away from the sound.

Suggestions?

 

Record it so we can hear it.

 

seems like a bad bearing on the fan, needs to be replaced

 

Here's the best audio file I could come up with. I can hear it clearly with my ears, but the mic on my phone only picks it up faintly. Maybe one of you all can clean it up (its somewhat faint and in the background). And I opened up the bottom cover to listen more closely. Its coming from the motherboard on the right side (USB-C area), not the hard drive. Only present when the fans spin up. Now I'm worried it's the fan controller cause it sound electronic in nature.

 

Cant check the sound file now. But arent you hearing a type of coil whine? WHen the fans spin on this also means there is some more load.

 

Too consistent a sound to pass it off as extra CPU load. Especially since the fans spin up occasionally when at idle, but that just means I need to clean the dust out of the heatsinks. The only reason I notice it is because it is so consistent. Always starts sounding about second after the fans spin up and quits about second before they cut out. It really does sound like bad hard drive heads, except there it no hard drive in that area to make such a sound.

 

I have found if I manually (using HWinfo) spin up the fans, after several minutes, the clicking goes away. Leads me to believe this is definitely something with a circuit on the motherboard. Just not sure what.

 

Sounds like the fan bearing is failing.

 

If the fan bearing was having issues, wouldn't that produce a constant sound when the fan is running?

 

I cannot hear anything out of the ordinary in your sound file except for a plopping sound once which I suspect is not the laptop?

There are some electronic sounds coming from my laptop since day one and pretty much every PC I had.

 

No necessarily. The blades spin in a magnetic field, pivoting around the central axis. What can happen is that is stabilizes once it reaches higher frequencies; low=good, medium=bad and high=good, for instance.

Reason for it only becoming an issue now could be because there's no more grease left. If it's a Sunon maglev then things are tricky, but for other types you can pop off the blades and drop in a bit of lubricant. This does take a bit of force, so there's some risk in snapping off one of the feeble blades. Using pliers and pulling on the 'dome' part, away from the board, has the best chance of success.

Spoiler: fan coils and bearing, blades removed

Also ... it might simply scrape against its housing. Once it spins that lifts the blades away from the board, so the noise could disappear again. This can be checked for by looking for scratches on the plastic.

 

On some bearing it only happen at low speed, can't really say what's the issue.

 

I took apart and thoroughly cleaned the fans on my R3. Fans are definitely not the issue. There was very little dust build up on them or the heatsinks. Curiously enough, if I manually spin my fans up in HWinfo, no clicking. Might end up being a software issue. Just have to figure out what.

 

Like i said. Electrical noise. Its pretty common and normal with these machines.

 

Yes, that seems likely then. For instance, an smd power inductor resonates at different frequencies and it could've become a little dislodged from the board, ticking against it for a while. Heavier components such as these often have some goo draped over and around it in order to limit the effect.

Could initiate a quick stress test while physically holding back the cpu fan. Not too long, of course. Once you know which IC is to blame then the issue is fixable.

There's also electrical-electrical noise, which only become apparent over the speakers. Detaching their cables can rule that out.

 

On my PC, its like blowing a whistle or sound of rain pattering on window.

 

I think its not even a dislodged. Just the usual vibrations of electricity in a small space. If I put my ear on the chassis I can hear all kinds of things with electronic devices like this.

 

So, an update. The noise no longer presents itself every time the fan is on. More like every other time.

But my system freeze is back.

I'm thinking the two are possibly related.

My system would randomly freeze on me early on. There was no consistent action(s) precluding it. My main (built-in) screen would go black and my system would no longer respond. I didn't think it was the video card since if my TV was on and set to display from my 17 as its secondary display, my TV screen would keep showing my desktop even though the built-in screen would go black.

The random freeze went away after I updated the BIOS and video drives (both of them).

This is getting to be annoying...

 

The right fan is actually your GPU fan, the CPU fan is on the left, just FYI