Case Fans

[nheather]

Got some Artic PWM case fans arriving today. One of Artic’s selling point is that they can be daisy chained together so they can work off one fan header - the CPU fan header to be precise.

I have my doubts about why you would daisy-chain and would appreciate your thoughts.

1. Power - taking the power for six fans from one header - I expect that isn’t an issue as each fan draws little load but would it still not be better to use all the fan headers to distribute the load.
2. Arctic claim the benefit of daisy chaining is that they all work from the same temperature sensor, the CPU, therefore the fans shut down if the CPU is cool. Fair enough but what temperature do the SYS fan headers work off. Generally in the BIOS, the only threshold profiling is against the CPU temperature. So wouldn’t all the SYS fans work of the CPU temperature anyway.
3. One benefit I could see is if you don’t have more fans than headers, or that not all the MoBo fan headers are 4 pin.
4. The real benefit I can see is cable management - you can secure the fan cabling to the chassis with just one wire going to the motherboard and I am inclined to daisy chain just for this reason. But Artic don’t present that as an advantage.

Anyway appreciate any thoughts that you have.

Cheers,

Nigel

 

[nheather]

Most of the headers on my C7H allow 1A (12W) power draw from a fan header, only 2 allow 3A (32W). So I would check you mobo manual to see what your headers allow before daisy chaining more than 4 on a header.

Looked through the manual, doesn’t say as far as I can tell.

But that besides is there any value in daisy-chaining other that keeping the wiring neater.

The SYS fan headers support speed control, as far as I can see you can’t select what temperature sensor this is driven from so I assume that it is the CPU.

Cheers,

Nigel