Making fans 5V...help please.

Ingonuts13 said:
What exactly does this do? Take a 12V input and drop it down to 5V, in essence only feeding the fan 5V?

Any other suggestions? I am in serious need of getting these off of the Fan Controller I have as the thing sucks for these large fans.
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Yep, exactly that.

Other than that you could get an entire fan control panel such as the Zalman ZM-MFC1, or try software like SpeedFan and see if you can control any via that. http://www.almico.com/speedfan.php
 
you could just power the fan off of the 5v rail instead of the 12v rail.

run the fan off of the 5v positive and negative instead of the 12v positive and negative

supposing your fan will start at 5v
 
Great suggestions so far.

I have the 120mm Sanyon Denki San Ace Fans. I am told by several people that they will start at 5V and run very quietly at that.
 
D4RK1C3 said:
you could just power the fan off of the 5v rail instead of the 12v rail.

run the fan off of the 5v positive and negative instead of the 12v positive and negative

supposing your fan will start at 5v
Click to expand...

frankly that is inaccurate: The OP would use the +5V and ground. Apart from the fact that there is not negative rail on the 4-pin molex connectors common in computers (talking HDD/ FDD).

Use Red (5V) + Black (GND)
 
drizzt81 said:
frankly that is inaccurate: The OP would use the +5V and ground. Apart from the fact that there is not negative rail on the 4-pin molex connectors common in computers (talking HDD/ FDD).

Use Red (5V) + Black (GND)
Click to expand...

You are right that there is no negative. Also the two black wires are common ground correct?

So Red=12V Yellow=5V Blacks=Ground

Any chance of me frying anything by trying this? I have a POS spare AT PSU I can run this test on.

Is it really just as simple as swapping the red for yellow?
 
Red is 5V(+) Black is Ground (both of them) (-), and yellow is 12V+

Just remember that Power Supplies typicals have alot less watts for their 5V rails than their 12V rails.

You could also run them at 7V, Red to ground on fan, Yellow to Yellow on fan.
I would suggest using a seperate Y adapter to do this and lable it, so you don't forget and blow up a Harddrive or something else late on when you forget to undo the mod.

If you buy THAT Adapter, that resistor may get very hot. Keep in mind when messing with it.
 
Yes, I think I am probably going to NOT buy the adapter and mess with a resistor. Just another thing to fail. What I will probably do is wire up a 5V and 7V test lead and see if there is any major difference in noise/performance.

I have a Y, splitter thats a mod waiting to happen. Now I wish that these San Ace's came with the Molex on them already instead of me having to play with a converter.

Thanks for all the advice guys, I will see how this works out for me this evening.
 
Ahh thats where my Microbusses com in handy, I don't know if they still make these things, but it uses a regular 4 pin molex for power (or a volt modded one) Then you can plug bare wires (no connectors) into it directly (its about 1.5 inches x 1 inch)(I have some CCFL's in my old case running off it so I could use one switch to easily turn them all on and not have molex everywhere.)

got it from PC Mods a few years ago, glad I boguht 2 of them now :)
 
RogueTrip said:
http://www.overclockers.com/tips766/

clean 7volt mod
Click to expand...

Thanks for the link. Actually the forums were down too long otherwise I would have posted that I accomplished my 7V mod. I used a two way splitter with one end being 7V and the other being 5V so I could test the difference. I ended up liking 7V more since it is virtually silent yet still moves quite a few CFMs.
 
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