Two fans off one header?

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27 Jun 2003
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As per the title really! I was wondering if it was possible to run two fans off one motherboard header?

I have two whisper quiet Yate Loons to be installed and the nearest power feed is from the motherboard, they are rated at 1a each if I recall correctly. Would I be better off finding a spare molex somewhere and would the PWM work?

Cheers
 
Id try to avoid doing that to be honest... It will pull too much power from the header and this can dammage the board.

Might be ok if you are using low powered fans, but not hi powered ones.

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Oh and only have the yellow wire on one of them or PWM will get funky.
 
Memphis is right. It can't overload the header as the power comes from the molex cable. You're lucky to have pwm fans :)

Using multiple 3 pin fans with a simple Y works, but it's not at all recommended unless you've checked the current rating of the motherboard headers. It's sometimes difficult to find this information.
 
I daisy chained 2 xilence red wings and they've been working fine for at least a year now.

Just don't do it with high powered fans as stated above.
 
I have one of those too. Running three 120mm LED fans with no problem - excellent if your motherboard only has two headers - like mine :mad:.
 
I have two whisper quiet Yate Loons to be installed and the nearest power feed is from the motherboard, they are rated at 1a each if I recall correctly.
1A would make 12W of power and that would make fan sounding like aircraft in takeoff was it W in there instead of A?


Good motherboard manual should tell how much current/power single fan header can give out and what's their total output.
 
I don't advise using more than 1 fan off mb headers even if they are rated to take it... as I've seen more than one case where its been the most likely cause of problems with a motherboard.
 
one thing i was wondering about with that fan cable is what happens to the speed line? is that taken from just one fan or combined in the header or lost? i couldnt seem to work it out from the pic.

Sam
 
With the akasa pwm splitter cable id reccomend using the same fans, i have 3 connected to it, 2 on a cooler and a rear exhaust. All are 400-1200 rpm pwm fans, all three spin at the same speed and ramp up/down according to cpu temp. The rpm of all fans will show up as a single readout in any fan monitoring utility used.
 
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