Water cooling radiator with fan extender

MasterBuilder

MasterBuilder

MasterBuilder

Associate
Joined
10 Jan 2018
Posts
7
Hi there

So I've been working on water cooling ideas for my latest build and in my travels i came across a time-lapse video on a popular video hosting website of a dude building his water cooled rig.

In this video (I can no longer find) he was sporting two radiators, a 240mm and 360mm with an in-built fan extender allowing him to plug his 2/3 fans in to the radiator and only have one cable from the radiator to his on board extender

after about a week of looking I cant find a single example available on the market but am 90% sure it wasn't a mod he had done himself.

Has anyone else seen these, if so would anyone be able to post a link to either the video or manufacturer website?

Many thanks in advance.
 
They'll have used something similar to the Phanteks fan hub / controller and then used a longer 4pin cable.
 
Sounds like they just used a splitter PCB and stuck it to the rad. Brodholm did exactly this for his Wing X99; put a load of 4-pin fan headers on some veroboard, ran a single PWM cable into the fan controller elsewhere and stuck the veroboard to his rad.
 
Bear in mind you'll have the same power issues on a splitter PCB as you will with a splitter cable if you're trying to run multiple fans from a single motherboard header, so be sure your mobo can handle it (unless you're connecting the splitter to a powered fan controller somewhere).
 
That is something I hadn't considered, I did get a powered controller with my Asus mobo, but haven't found a way to mount it that I'm comfortable with. But I'll be mounting 7x 12' fans to three radiators (2x 240mm and a 360mm) so I should have enough cooling even with the fans at 1000rpm, does that sound right?
 
Cooling sounds fine, just work out how you're going to power them. If that's the fan extension board from Asus (I have one with my Maximus VIII Impact) then be sure to use it with the 5-pin cable and Molex power. That gives you 4 more actual PWM headers that are controlled from the motherboard.
 
Came with my Crosshair VI Extreme, I assume it's the same one. Maximum I will have running off one header is 3x fans on the 360mm but the board has I think 10 separate headers before I take in to account the powered controller board that has an extra 4, would you say three is an issue?
 
MasterBuilder said:
...would you say three is an issue?
Click to expand...

I honestly don't know. A decent PWM header can deliver 1A of power so in theory you're OK, but you see many stories about PWM signals not sending properly, some fans are fine, others don't work, etc. etc. etc. All I can say is try it and see what happens. Just makes sure all the headers you use are proper PWM headers if you're using PWM fans (I think Asus ROG boards are all PWM, but check).
 
Not necessarily, there are plenty of boards out there that have 4-pin headers but still only use voltage control. I'm pretty sure all of the top-end Asus boards are fully PWM on the 4-pin headers, but it's worth double-checking. Unusual the manual wouldn't say, so give Asus a shout directly.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom