Zalman VF-900's on a 4850 x2

Hey guys,

I bought a pair of these VF900's to quiet the jet engine that is the 4850 x2's cooling system, which is working out so far, and keeping temps manageable, but I have one beef that I think I can fix. I just want a second opinion.

The VF-900's use 3 pin fan connections that come with little crappy black boxes with knobs to manually adjust the fan speed, however, I've been spoiled with fans that connect directly to the video card and are automatically controlled by the catalyst software.

So my thought is to splice the connections and plug the new coolers into the video card


If I understand correctly, on a 3 pin fan one wire is the voltage (5v?) another is the fan speed, and a third is a grounding wire.

The cooling blocks that came with the video card use 2 pin connections, presumably one being voltage and the other, a grounding wire.


First, can I even do this?
Will the possibility of mixed voltages fry out the fans? Or not feed them enough power?
Can I make do without a ground wire?

it would be nice to have the gpu fans plug into the card itself instead of having a tangle of wires trying to find a spot on the motherboard to plug in (I dont have a spare one for the fan in my side panel at the moment) and have a ribbon of cables running out so I can turn these fans up every time I get into a game


Thanks in advance for any input