controlling fans through motherboard

O

oregon

Active Member
I want to try and reduce fan speed to reduce noise. I just set my Antec case fans to low and this is fine. I got some cheap rosewills though that are noisy when hooked up by molex. Would it be possible to plug one into the motherboard, then daisy chain another by molex? And control them both with speedfan? Or should I just buy a new fan or two that works quietly on molex?
 
What happened to the original 12v fans? You could add in fan controllers.

Each point on the board is for one fan alone which is then monitored by the bios. You put Rosewill fans in a 900? :eek: ! and then you wonder why it's noisey! :P The original Antec fans here are nice and quiet.
 
Yeah, the people on newegg said they were surprised at how quiet they were, the could barely hear them, stuff like that. Now I realize they are not really quiet at all.

Original 12V fans?

Isn't there only one point on the motherboard for fans? I have the P35-DS3L.
 
Cpu, rear case, and two other 5v points are seen on the Asus model here. The fans on the 900 are 12v taking the standard molex connector used on ide drives. That's why I was relieved to have gone with the 700w OCZ model supply seeing the extra feeds to see everything going. The 120 I stuck on the side cover was the only one plugged into the board besides the Zalman 9700's fan controller.
 
You can actually daisy chain all the case fans, so you really only need one or two molex for them.

Once they are plugged into the board though, how do you go about controlling their speed? Speed fan doesn't seem to affect them right now.
 
Each location on the board is monitored and set in the bios. You can set the alarm if the cpu fan falls below a certain speed and some limited options for other things. Each fan should be plugged in separately if you want it monitored by the board.

For direct power off of the supply you would then use a separate fan controller to adjust the speed by voltage settings like 0-12v, 0-5v whatever hat is rated for. When seeing fans tied together one controller would then see all fans adjusted at the same time. Pulling power directly from the supply would be still be better then trying to pull it through the board from one or two points.
 
Speedfan usually doesn't work. If you want motherboard fan control you should buy PWM fans, they are controlled by your bios.
 
What is PWM, and how can you tell? Also my BIOS have the option of doing voltage control, so shouldn't that work?
 
PWM = Pulse Width Modulation used in various applications including dc motors like those for case fans. With those and since boards often lack the ability to control fan speeds you see a digital rather then analog type signal that can take a 5v output and see that boosted to 12v.
 
PWM fans has connectors that looks like your normal 3-pin fan connector, but has 4 pins. This way you plug it into your CPU fan connector (which is often time the only one that can be controlled). You can daisy chain certain PWM fans so you can control multiple fans. Also make sure you change your bios setting to PWM mode.
 
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