Nzxt fan wiring

[rustyj]

Im buiding my first pc and have 6 fans.I understand i can tie acouple molex connectors together for power,but i stillhave 6 3 pin connectors and only 3 places on mb>Im lost thanks for any help.Rj

 

[JohnnyLucky]

Typically motherboards come with 3 or 4 fan connections. One is for the cpu heatsink fan. Make sure you plug the cpu fan into that connection. your system will monitor that cpu fan. You can plug a two more fans into the motherboard. Plug only one fan connection into one mother board connection. Your system may or may not monitor the other two fans connected to the motherboard.

You'll have a few more fans that still need to be connected. They should be connected to your pc's power supply. Does your power supply have a cable for your fans? Does it have a molex to fan adapter? Are there some other cables that look like they could be used to daisy chain the fans to a molex to fan adapter? Without knowing what cables you have available it is difficult to advise you.

 

[rustyj]

I have the cpu fan connector hooked up,and I do have 3 cables from power supply each has 3 molex connectors,so I can have power to each fan,just didint know if I need to have the all the 3 pin connectors to mb or not,S o tech mb monitors cpu fan ,all other run all the time when power is on right?Thank

 

[LePhuronn]

Unless you get a fan controller and plug your extra fans into that, then yes your fans will spin at full speed all the time by just plugging them directly into the PSU.

 

[Paperdoc]

Three fans and three Molex connectors, seems there's a capacity limit. BUT there is an easy solution. You can get two-from-one adapters that convert one Molex connector into two. Stack three of them and you can make four-from-one, then you use the Molex-to-fan adapters to connect the fans to those extra Molex supply points. Fans use little power, so you can easily afford to power four from one original Molex connector from the PSU outputs, leaving the other two originals still free.

A fan controller as LePhuronn suggests may be another way, IF that controller has multiple outputs for fans from one Molex supply, and it gives you ability to manually set fan speeds.

Another option if you are handy at soldering is to splice fan wires together so that two or three fans are powered all from one connector plugged into a mobo fan pinout. There are two things to watch for here. One is that you can't really get spec's for how much power the mobo output is prepared to provide to "the fan", so it's hard to know if you are in danger of overloading that pinout. My GUESS is you could easily do this with two fans from one pinout, maybe three, more than that I have no idea! The other is to be careful which wires you splice. A typical fan has three wires - Black for Ground, Red for +12 vdc supply, and yellow for a fan speed signal sent back to the mobo. The mobo's automatic fan speed control uses temperature measured somewhere relevant to vary the +12 vdc supply for fan speed, and then monitors the speed signal (yellow wire) to ensure it is running and display the actual speed if you want to see it. However, it could not possibly figure out fan speed if you were to splice together the yellow leads from three fans! So when you splice, put the Blacks all together, and the Reds all together, but leave ONLY ONE YELLOW lead attached to the fan connector - simply leave the yellow leads from the other two fans not connected to anything. The actual speeds of those two will never be known to the mobo, but it will be happy to tell you about the one yellow lead signal it does get. Meanwhile, ALL (2 or 3) of these fans with Blacks and Reds spliced together will get the same supply voltage and run at the same speeds.

Don't misuse mobo fan connectors. The one marked CPU_FAN MUST be used ONLY for the CPU cooling fan. Likewise, if there's one labeled PWR_FAN, it can ONLY be used for a lead coming out of your PSU for this purpose - many PSU's do NOT have such a connector, so you cannot connect anything to this mobo pinout. Then you will have one, two or more fan pinouts labeled SYS_FAN1, etc. THESE are the ones for case fans. Read your manual carefully. I think mine says the SYS_FAN1 connector actually uses a mobo temperature measurement to control the speed of a fan connected here, but the SYS_FAN2 connector has no speed control system and simply runs full speed all the time. Yours may differ.

 

[JohnnyLucky]

^5 +1 what paperdoc said!

I was just getting around to continue but paperdoc beat me to it.

By all means connect two more fans to the motherboard if you can. In addition to being labelled SYS_FAN1 the fan connections may also be marked Chassis_ Fan1 or maybe just Fan1. If you're lucky your system might monitor those fans also. I normally connect the case fan on the rear panel and the case fan at the bottom of the front panel because I can't see them while I can see the fan on the side panel and the top panel.

The easiest thing to do with the remaining fans is to daisy chain them and connect them to a single molex connection on your psu. That's what I do. As paperdoc correctly pointed out fans use very very little power. As important as the fans are, the power they consume is insignificant when compared to the cpu and video card.

There are a variety of fan adapters, splitter, and extension cables with numerous configurations. Here's a link to a web page with 52 assorted fan cables:

http://www.frozencpu.com/cat/l2/g2/c251/list/p1/Cables-Fan_Cables.html?o=title_az

 

[rustyj]

Just want to say Thanks for all the help,I will try and work some tonight and then tackle more wiring later lol.This is a nice project,but being my first im slow and double checking myself very much.Will let ya know how it turn out.Thanks again

 

[rustyj]

Hey guys just wanna say thanks for the info.It is up and running,this thing is screaming.Works great.Runing at 40-41c,This was a great forst time experience

 

[Paperdoc]

Yay for you! Even we like happy endings! Now for your next project ....

 

[rustyj]

Just trying to think what else I can do with this,it has so much potential,I have plenty of run,can hold up to 8 hd,plenty of open slots lol.could really buils a monster if I only knew what to do .thinking of trying to link it to my tv wireless so i can download movies on pc and watch on tv.

 

[JohnnyLucky]

Tom's Hardware has some nice "how to" articles explaining how to set up a home theater pc.