Mac Pro 4,1 (Early-2009) - PCIe Fan Broken?

Hi Everyone:
I had a day off today and decided to do a bit of cleaning as its been a while (quite a while as far as my Mac Pro is concerrned).
I shut it down, unplugged all the cables and placed it on the table.
I removed the side cover, processor tray, all four drive bays, the GPU, and the PCIe Fan.
I blasted everything with compressed air or give it a nice wipe, much better!
I placed everything back inside the case and booted it up. It sounded slightly off, but I was going to check everything anyways. I looked at iStat Menu's and noticed that "Expansion Fan" was rated at 0rpm. Not good.
Maybe the sensor got damaged? I removed the side cover and looked at the fan, it wasn't spinning.
I unplugged everything, reset the SMC and tried again. Same thing. I reset the PRAM, same thing.
I removed the 1st and 2nd drives, took out the fan and resetted it very slowly until I heard a nice click.
Powered it up again and it still won't come to life.
I have two worries:
1. Did I damage the fan?
2. Did I damage the connector on the motherboard?
I'm most definitely out of Applecare (the machine is just over 3 years old, about 2 months over )
I'm horrified to think what an out of warranty logic board replacement would cast me just to get this fan fixed.
How important is this fan? I've only got one PCI card inside (the HD 4870) and its fan works fine.
Thoughts?
- D

Daphoid wrote:
...I definitely need to get this fixed. The question is do I lug it into an apple store (awkward) or do I replace the fan and see if that solves it. Or third, do I have a local company do a house call (comvienent but more expensive).
Back on track with the right Mac Pro version, maybe there's a fourth possibility, ugly but functional. The PCIe area fan in the '09 and '10 Mac Pros is a different setup from the the earlier ones. The early ones had the fan at one end of the PCIe area, forcing air through and out the back. The '09 fan has a space next to it on the door side so the PCIe space isn't pressurized in the same way. If the fan isn't working, you could attach a larger fan on the outside of the front grill and power it separately. If anything, that might be an improvement by forcing the air through. It wouldn't adjust for actual internal temperature but it would help cool the cards, HD's and video card. The non-functioning fan would be in the way but the air pushing through would get the job done.

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