We Call It "Weather" Here

Even as my colleagues around Europe complain of a heat wave, things have been pretty much normal here–35^oC outside, 27-ish inside, made tolerable only by the fact that I have minimized the number of active devices in my office (where the hottest things are probably my monitors and the ageing Surface Pro 3 that I use at my standing desk).

Which doesn’t mean things don’t get too hot. I woke up the other day to find that borg had halted at around 5AM, and I immediately suspected thermals, so, again, I popped it open, swapped out the CPU fan (some things are so predictable I keep spares) and, while I did that, asked one of my agents to check telemetry–which, despite my best efforts, I’ve been neglecting to turn into alarms:

It’s pretty obvious, even looking at the monthly data (which I pulled out to get an idea of the overall trend), that one of the fans started failing over the weekend–and it was the Noctua NF-A9x14 that I’ve been using for the CPU cooler.

Since those slim profile fans seem to die on me around every 18 months or so, this time I got an Artic P9 Max, on the spurious grounds that:

• It has a much higher CFM
• I can still fit a 25mm fan into the B660 (there’s enough clearance below the PSU)

It is, of course, much noisier, but we are in the middle of a heat wave and I expect it to throttle down eventually. Either way, I did get another Noctua to keep around as a spare, because fans are probably the only PC part that is cheap enough to keep a spare of these days…

While I waited for the new fan to arrive, I decided to whip up a stupidly visible temperature monitor to keep an eye on it, and the results were… dramatic:

I don’t expect this to be the last time I do this, but I hope it will at least be a while before I have to do it again. The B660 is an amazing motherboard/case combo, but it is not designed for high-performance cooling–or Portuguese weather.