Hello
I'm going to wire a fan to a molex with a potentiometer AND to the motherboard through a 6pin toggle switch, that would toggle between PSU/OFF/MB, attaching diagram. Will it work or will i fry anything?
Seems solid. Might I ask what you're using it for? And the only thing I could say is to state the obvious that you'll lose any sort of PWM support, which is obviously why you're using the potentiometer.
I will throw in that ZALMAN makes a great package that's purpose built for exactly this, and while it seems a little cheap, the few that I've picked up over the years have always worked great. It doesn't drop below 5V so that you can never fully disable the fan it's powering, and it's heatsinked. The Fan Mate 2.
I'm using it for the CPU, GPU and PSU fans, for a home server to be as quiet as possible and to keep it flexible, having the options to have all fans OFF, AUTO and MANUAL basically, but mostly to have the airplane style switch board :)
So ur saying that if i wire it like this the motherboard wont be able to control the fans? It should keep it since the switch cuts the molex completely when setting it to MB.
But i am concerned about the molex the sending power into the MB header?
And yes i'm using an off the shelf potentiometer, it's smaller, cheaper and in the local hardware store, without preorder :)
So are you keeping the RPM sense wire connected through to the motherboard?
Running linux you can control your fan speed through the motherboards input output bus. Typically in /sys/devices/platform/*Name of the fan controller chip*/*fan port* These are normally set up as simple io devices with 8Byte values. Just echo the speed you want between 0 and 255 into the correct file (port) and tadah! It also is important to tell the motherboard to use voltage control on the fans first. Otherwise it will attempt to change the frequency through the pwm pin.
I've got two massive 160CFM psu fans in my system cooling my FX-9590 and I barely hear the fans because they stay off until I put any load on the system. Then vroom, they spin up to 5000RPM. Admittedly they never operate above about 30% because... they don't need to... So my system remains relatively quiet. But what more could you want to cool a FX-9590 for $45 CAD.
Yes i am, because i'm wiring it into an 3(4) pin extensions, cutting into only the + and - and making a bypass through the switch between the potentiometer or just strait through, attaching diagram
But thank you for reminding me! I only used a 2 pin extension for the CPU, correcting that :)
Ah, gotcha. See that's the part of the diagram that I must not have seen.
Great, tnx!
All i need now is to figure out how to wire a similar toggle to an UTP cable xD