Zalman VF900 question

[Calefaction]

I am about to order a pair of VF900's for my 7900GT's, but I am curious...do I have to use that silly FAN MATE thing, or can I just plug the fans in to the same socket as the stock cooler? I am pretty sure my cards have the standard 3 pin fan socket on them. If I do plug them in to that port, will the Nvidia fan control stuff in the driver be able to control the fan speeds in place of FAN MATE?

(Feel free to move this to the Video Cards forum if that's where it belongs. It was a toss up, but I figured the question is about a cooler...so )

 

[blazingrig]

del.

 

[NordicRX8]

You can run the rpm wire back to the plug on the card, and splice the fan's power leads to a molex or a Fan controller (like I did). This way, you can control fan speeds while allowing your videocard tweaking tool (ATI tool in my case), to still monitor the fan RPMs.

Good Luck.

 

[este]

I hooked mine up to motherboard.

Its on at 100% but I can't hear it so, 100 it stays.

PSU is perfectly acceptable.

 

[skadebo]

I'm not 100% sure about the 7900gt, but I ran into a similar problem with my x800xt. I removed the plastic plug on the card itself, exposing the two pins. I also had to switch around the black and white wires on the vf900 so that I could plug it in to make it work. atitools controls the fan just fine now and frees up my mobo fan header for the case fan.

 

[kirbyrj]

I never thought about splicing the wire back onto the card to control fan speed. I just run the whole 3-pin fan adapter back to a fan controller and just run it off that manually.

 

[Calefaction]

Got them installed with the multi-connector, both on the 12v plugs. My system is quite a bit more quiet now, and my temps went from 50C idle/70-74C load, to 35C idle/50-54 load. Time to give them a bit of an OC

 

[este]

skadebo, kirbyrj:

I'd be careful about wiring up to the card's fan header. You have no idea what voltage, pulse width, power output, maximum load is on that header and the driver behind it.

Its not really likely, but its possible you are connecting a fan that at a high pulse width could be drawing a few mA more then that driver was meant to source.

Overall, that seems like a bad idea. There isn't really an easy way for you to determine what that original fan is pulling per pulse width without and oscilloscope.


Just wire it to the PSU if you have an open mobo connector. At 100% speed its silent so who cares.

 

[XboxodX]

skadebo, kirbyrj:

I'd be careful about wiring up to the card's fan header. You have no idea what voltage, pulse width, power output, maximum load is on that header and the driver behind it.

Its not really likely, but its possible you are connecting a fan that at a high pulse width could be drawing a few mA more then that driver was meant to source.

Overall, that seems like a bad idea. There isn't really an easy way for you to determine what that original fan is pulling per pulse width without and oscilloscope.


Just wire it to the PSU if you have an open mobo connector. At 100% speed its silent so who cares.

That might be true, but people like to have it on the card because they don't want to run any more wires, plus, if you plug it in to your mobo, you lose a fan header.