Possible/Safe to run multiple fans from the same header?

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redman223

Gawd
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Oct 28, 2006
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I have a bunch of fans in my case and right now it looks terrible as you can see from the picture. I am sure that this is not the correct way to hook up multiple fans, so I am wondering what I can do to remedy this. The fans come with the normal fan header plug, and then come with an adapter that converts it to a molex connection.

DSC01097.jpg
 
Motherboard fan headers are limited in the number of watts they can provide. The last thing you want to do is overload them and potentially ruin your motherboard.

The safest solution is to run them all from your power supply, or through a fan controller.
 
you dont have 1-2 extra connectors on your PSU? i was doing that, and i had 2 molex ( i think thats what they are called) connectors that i had hid for Cable management, and i pulled those out just to make sure that i wasnt overloading anything...
 
I have the worlds worst cable management (don't worry, its going to be re-done when my 780i comes in the mail):

DSC01092.jpg


Because of this, and the watercooling (also getting taken out when I get the 780i), I have 8 fans that need to be powered and I couldn't think of a way to do it properly, so I just hooked them up together as you seen in the picture in the first post. I have a fan controller, but it only has support for 4 fans.

How many watts are usually allotted for a motherboard, in this case the EVGA 680i? Is there some sort of adapter, so that you could run 2 fans from a single header? They are the SilenX fans (I know that they have a bad rap, and are highly overpriced, etc).
 
Well I recalculated everything out and the the 780i has 5 headers on it, and I will have a total of 6 fans, (4x120, 2x80). I am sure I can run the 80's off of 1 header. Which will work fine, BUT I will need extension cords of some sort. I have seen the 2-1 3-pin adapters, but have never seen an extension cord for the 3pin-3pin.

As you can see I really need to re-route my cabled, but some of them just don't seem long enough.
 
Its going to depend more on the fans themselves than anything: some fans, like the panaflo fba12g12u, consume 10x the power of other 120mm fans even, like the Vantec Stealths for instance. Start by looking at the fans
 
Look at the motherboard manual. That's how I found out my P5K-E can allow up to 2000mA per header. At first, I ran my 3 Yate Loon D12SM-12 (300mA each) fans on a 4 pin molex but since I knew this, I plugged all 3 on a header (it's a radiator fans setup).

 
Well the EVGA manual has nothing about the amperage that the fan headers will accept. I will have to contact EVGA and find out from them.

Well I found the extension cables and the splitters, so hopefully everything will look 100x cleaner in a month or so.
 
I couldnt imagine a header not being able to run at least 1 amp... thats enough for a couple fans at least of the high mA ones, and a bunch of lower amp ones.
 
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