Cooling my compaq tower

[wingzero_ac19x]

I have been monitoring all of the temps in my case and everything seems good except for one. I have an Arctic Freezer 64 pro Heatsink/fan on my processor faced so that it pushes the air towards the back of the tower. The issue comes in because the heatsink is designed with the lowest fins curved downward which is supposed to push air over system components, this however is a slight problem because my Northbridge is right below my processor and the temp has shot up to 55 degrees celsius on average. Everything else is nice and cool, just the northbridge is hot. The fan for the processor is a four pin type that uses pwm to control speed, however my system just has a three pin connector and cannot control fan speeds anyway. Speedfan and the bios report the processor fan is running about 800 rpms, this fan I believe can turn up to 2000 rpms. If I connect this fan to a molex adapter, will it run the fan wide open? I want to see if moving more cfm of air through the heatsink will cool the northbridge. If I do it that way, will there be any problems with not having anything plugged onto the motherboard cpu fan connector? Can I use this connector for another case fan? Sorry for the long post, just trying to put as much information as possible out there.

 

[diduknowthat]

Connecting fans to 4-pin molex connectors will always run them at full speed. And the biggest problem that you can run into is confusing your computer. You'll have to disable any sort of alarms that triggers when the CPU fan rpm drops below a certain point.

 

[wingzero_ac19x]

I already knew that plugging a molex adapter into a standard fan would run it wide open. The reason why I was curious in this case was because this fan was a four pin fan with pulse width modulation control. I wanted to make sure that a three pin fan to molex adapter would still run it wide open. My motherboard is already fussing everytime I start it up because the rpms the cpu fan turn are not enough to keep the warning from going off on the motherboard for a failed fan. That is why I wanted to know if I could plug a case fan there instead and get rid of that annoyance. Thanks for the response, it is greatly appreciated.