Thread: PWM fans

Hey guys, I recently got some noctua pwm fans for my case. My CPU is watercooled and runs just fine but my GPUs get pretty hot under load and I want to try to mitigate that without liquid cooling on my GPUs.

After I graduate and have some money a year or two down the line I'll eventually do liquid for everything but I'm sticking with air for now. Anyhow - 2 of my noctua fans are pwm fans with the 4 pin headers. My motherboard has only 2 4 pin headers which are currently occupied by the fans on my CPU cooler but I have an excess of 3 pin headers (something like 6 or 7 open headers).

For the life of me I can't find any adapters or boards with 4 pin headers online to get these guys working. Even the adapters can came with the fans are useless.

My question is have any of you have come across this situation before and how you solved it. I know you can plug 4 pin fans into a 3 pin mobo header and just leave the pwm pin out of the circuit - but then it's just running at full all the time. I wouldn't be opposed to this, but I'd like to try and find a better way.

All the fan controller installations I found on newegg were just for 3 pin fans. I have a 1000W PSU with plenty of power to spare if I needed to add a new controller in - I just can't seem to find one for PWM fans.



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I guess a better question is, anybody know of anyway to get more 4 pwm headers without replacing the mobo with one that has more?

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You should be able to get Molex connector adapters. It won't have the speed control, but it will run. You could also just plug it into the 3 pin fan connectors on the motherboard for the same effect.

6in 3-pin Fan to 4-pin Pass-Through Power Adapter Cable

Something like that.

You other option that I can think of are getting a fan controller. You could possibly put a potentiometer in series with the 12v as well depending on how much you want that fan control and how comfortable you would be with doing that.