Need to Squeeze a Little More Life Out of an Abit Fatal1ty AN9 32x With Chipset Fan Replacement

[Damaeus]

I've got an Abit Fatal1ty AN9 32x motherboard and one of the fans cooling
the heatsink on one of the chips (not the CPU) has died and it looks like
replacing it is going to be a pain in the butt. But I can't afford to buy
a new motherboard, CPU and memory right now.

It looks like I cannot easily replace the fans pictured here on the top
right corner (the fan on the bottom). And the heatsink also seems to be
attached to a heat pipe going to other chips on the board. What's
actually involved in doing this?

Here's a picture of it as it's installed in my case. I know I'll have to
take the board out to even be able to try to replace the fan, and I'm
going to want to replace both of them so I won't have to do this again
should the top fan go out:

http://home.earthlink.net/~damaeus/img/chipset-heatsink.jpg

This image shows a screw visible on the corner of one of the fans, and I'm
betting there's a second screw hidden by the heatsink, but I don't know
this for a fact without actually taking the motherboard out. My head is
too big to shove inside the case to get a good view through the fins of
the heatsink:

http://home.earthlink.net/~damaeus/img/fan-screw.jpg

My PC has been turning itself off in the last week and a half or so, and I
think it's because this fan is out. I've now got it uncomfortably cold in
my bedroom; And I've got a big fan blowing on high into the tower and
that's preventing the shut-downs, but I don't want to sit here and type
with popsicle fingers like I am now.

When I thought I was having a graphics card issue, I posted about this in
the NVIDIA group. Someone responded and his wish for luck was:

"Um, good luck."

And he knows more about these things than I do. I just build my own
computers. I don't usually start messing around with things ON the board
like this, but a fan seemed like it shouldn't be as much of a problem as
soldering or replacing capacitors.

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| Abit Fatal1ty AN9 32x | |
| AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 4200+ | |
| 2 GB DDR2 800 SDRAM | |
| Western Digital 320GB HD (NTFS) | EAT AT JOE'S |
| BFG Tech GeForce 7950 GTOC 512MB | |
| Mon: 27" Acer S271HL - 1920 x 1080 | |
| PSU: Thermaltake SP-850AH3CCB 850w | |
| (Installed New - July 2012) | |
| UPS: APC 1500 XS | |
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| OS: MS Windows XP Home Edition - SP3 |
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