Soldering a stock HSF plug onto a Zalman VF900cu cooler cord.

[_mementomori_]

Hi guys,

I'm a long-time lurker here but a first time poster. I joined to ask your professional opinion about modding my Zalman VF900cu VGA cooler to run off of my video card fan header the way the stock HSF did. I've heard of one or two people doing it, but details online are scant. I have a 512MB ASUS HD4850.

It had the "Glaciator" HSF as stock, which I've already removed and replaced with the Zalman cooler. It's much quieter, but my temps didn't drop at all. I'm hoping that if I can get the Zalman connected to the card's fan header, I can use the Catalyst Control Center again to adjust fan speeds.

Thanks very much in advance.

 

[evongugg]

Welcome to the forums!

I suggest you get a fan controller instead of soldering.
There may not be enough power on the card for the fan.
You could check the voltages on the card and on the fan with a multimeter.

 

[_mementomori_]

I'm having no luck with any sort of fan controllers. The Zalman comes with a "Fanmate 2" that is supposed to allow for fan control, but installing literally kills the fan completely. I have a cheap prebuilt motherboard with most of the features locked and I think fan monitoring/control may be one of them.

Besides, wouldn't you think that if the card supported the fan from the original cooler that it would support this one? I'll give the multimeter suggestion a shot. Thanks for your time.

 

[_mementomori_]

Just wanted to pop back in and say that I performed the mod with absolute, 100% success. I'm now running the Zalman VF900's fan directly on the video card header.

My idle temps dropped immediately by 10c, and that's with the fan set only at 60%.