Fans, fan controllers and me.

[Ucof]

I have a fan controller at home. Its nothing special, does the job I suppose, but I have a few queries about fan controllers in general:

1) Can you connect the fan to the controller, then back onto the motherboard again so you can use something like SpeedFan to measure the speeds? i am aware that some fan controllers have fan speed readings on them via an LCD display, but Im talking about ones that don't have these.

2) When I have adjusted the speed of the fan with the twiddley knob, I would expect the fans to slow down to whatever the knob/ dial was set to. However, more often than not, the fan will just slow down and stop, giving the occasional whimper and jump. Would this be due to the fans, or the fan controller?

3) Is a pot diff and a varialbe resistor the same thing?

 

[Defiance_co]

Hiya,
Yesterday i got the last delivery in my watercooling upgrade package

1: The controller i went for is the lian li TR 5b (b=black bezel rather than plain aluminium)
As far as i can gather it uses the mobo connx to take readings, so i can use speedfan etc (lian li site u can dl manual for it) maybe good idea to have a read thru it

2: From experience yrs ago, Some fans will not have enough juice to work on very low volts/watts so hence fan slows and stops, in my case it was down to rather cheap fans (going back many many yrs though) and of course fans nowadays can run on way lower volts/watts

3: When again many yrs ago i built a 2xlcd controller the pot was the variable resistor so unless there's a new modern term a pot is still a variable resistor

Hope that helps, if i find any part of reply is incorrect i'll post back

 

[mollymoo]

+1 on pots are definately variable resistors ..... a very old term that normally old men use

They used to have ... dont know if they still do .......... carbon brushes in them and a hole so you could spray a cleaner in them and clean them out