I recently had to replace the fan because the motor died, and agree, that's a really big hassle. If you want to unscrew/remove the whole fan from the motherboar

I recently had to replace the fan because the motor died, and agree, that's a really big hassle. If you want to unscrew/remove the whole fan from the motherboard, you have to lift off the whole heatsink assembly from the board+cpu, meaning you also have to re-apply thermal paste every time you clean the fan. Far from ideal. But the most difficult part was finding a screwdriver for the VGA port (it screws into the case).