4-pin fan controllers?

blakka · 16 Jan 2009 at 23:54

I have a cheap fan controller which does the job well, it can adjust the speed of up to four fans and has a nice LED display with rpm's.

My problem is that I have a Freezer 7 pro which uses a four pin plug(not molex) and also my 3870 gfx card uses a four pin plug. I would like to connect them to the fan controller so I can adjust the fan speeds. However The fan controller can only connect to 3-pin plugs so I can't connect the Freezer and gfx card.

Is it possible to buy adapters? If not how to I get around this problem?

How are you guys controlling the speed of your 4-pin intel fans and coolers?

Thanks.

WJA96 · 17 Jan 2009 at 04:29

blakka said:
I have a cheap fan controller which does the job well, it can adjust the speed of up to four fans and has a nice LED display with rpm's.

My problem is that I have a Freezer 7 pro which uses a four pin plug(not molex) and also my 3870 gfx card uses a four pin plug. I would like to connect them to the fan controller so I can adjust the fan speeds. However The fan controller can only connect to 3-pin plugs so I can't connect the Freezer and gfx card.

Is it possible to buy adapters? If not how to I get around this problem?

How are you guys controlling the speed of your 4-pin intel fans and coolers?

Thanks.

Scythe and Sunbeam make 4-pin PWM fan controllers. With the CPU and GPU fans though, I would leave them to the system to sort out. The variations under load are massive and you won't be able to adjust them fast enough to keep up.

blakka · 17 Jan 2009 at 11:00

Thanks WJA96. With the CPU and GPU what I was planning to do was turn the speed of the fans down when downloading,surfing etc and then turn them up to maximum speed when playing games. Is there anything wrong with that idea?

WJA96 · 17 Jan 2009 at 11:21

blakka said:
Is there anything wrong with that idea?

No, I just find it surprising that people think they can do a better job that the motherboard or GPU controllers that the manufacturers build-in.

PhillyDee · 17 Jan 2009 at 12:18

WJA96 said:
No, I just find it surprising that people think they can do a better job that the motherboard or GPU controllers that the manufacturers build-in.

Depends who makes the chipset tbh. I built a PC last year for my brother which has an Nvidia chipset and it is really really bad at fan speeds. If you overclock it (Which I did, it was a budget C2D) it ran everything at high speed. So I added pots and ran them off molex connectors instead.