Mid-range Liquid Cooling, Automated radiator fan control. – Cooler-and-Heatsinks – Overclocking. I’ve always just tied my fans to headers on the motherboard and then used something like Speedfan to control them.
With this outboard radiator, things are more complicated. We’ve mounted nine fans onto this huge outboard radiator, but there don’t appear to be any instructions or guidelines for how to wire it all up. So here is what I’ve found:
- Each fan is a traditional analog fan (doesn’t have a 4 wire PWM but a 3-wire so it can report back its rpm to something but is managed by changing the voltage to it). A big study shows that fans don’t draw too much about 0.5 for Noiseblocker and 1.5 watts for a Nexus, so ganging a bunch onto a 5V fan header shouldn’t be a problem as most motherboards can put out 6-8 watts or so from a header. So if I had a long enough fan wire, I could Y connector them all together and use the three case fan headers on the motherboard.
- The main issue is finding a 3:1 Y connector and a long enough fan cable. FrozenCPU and XOxide has a nice block from ModMyToys which takes a 3-pin fan and has a connector that takes it to three 3 pins. There is also a five way (but you have to be careful on voltage from the motherboard).j And if you don’t need voltage control, Sunbeam makes something that just takes Molex and has 6 3-pin fan connectors
- Then all that is needed is some longer cables. Xoxide has three feet worth of ModMyToys 3-pin cable which is pretty good and flexible and in a nice sleeve. Need three of these.
- Another option is an XOxide cable which doesn’t need a block is a 3-way 3-pin connector so it only needs extender from the motherboard. Given we have nine fans, we actually need three of these.
- It would be nice to have an actual bracket as having these come out of the mineral oil isn’t as neat. So we need a simple PCI bracket that has 3x 3-pin fan connector on each side. Hard to find one of those! But XOxide has one called a Phobya PCI Slot Cover 3×3 Fan 1xMolex which fits the bill.
