Is the fan in my MacBook Pro broken?
A few weeks ago I began hearing this strange rattling sound coming from the fan inside my MacBook Pro Early 2015 13 inch model. It occurred only intermittently, was self limiting and didn't seem to be caused by any physical movement of the laptop itself. I checked with the app Macs Fan Control if it was actually related to the fan, by activating the fan manually. This gave mixed results, sometimes the sound came back and sometimes it didn't.
Click here for a short impression of the sound.
Fast forward a little bit, I am now no longer hearing the rattling. I have, however, now had a couple of episodes with my Mac slowing down, almost to the point of freezing, when it was running multiple tasks. To me it came across very much like thermal throttling. The Fan Control app showed that CPU core 1 & 2 reach as much as 90-95 degrees Celsius when only Chrome is open with a fullscreen youtube video running. The thing is, I tried manually activating the fan at max speed but this didn't work, no increased rpm at all. When set on 'auto' mode, then current RPM reading varies a little bit (max 1000-ish).
tl;dr weird rattling sound from my fan, disappeared spontaneously after a week. after that episodes with thermal throttling symptoms, can't activate fan manually anymore with Macs Fan Control app.
Is this a known problem? Could the fan be mechanically compromised? Any tips?
MacBook Pro 13", macOS 10.14