Which fans should be plugged into motherboard

michaelzehr

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Sep 18, 2008
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I am building a system with a coolermaster HAF 932. It comes with four fans -- front, side, top, rear. My motherboard supports two fan controls.

My question is which two of the four fans should I have the motherboard control?

Based on the layout, the easiest two would be the top and rear.

Additional information: I intentionally have more air cooling than I realistically need. Sometimes I run in a hot room, I've lost components to overheating before, I'm willing to put up with a little fan noise, and I find my builds last a long time with lots of fans. The rest of the build includes an i5-4690k with stock fan (probably won't be overclocking it soon, I know that means I'm not using the "k" but it was only a few dollars more than the 4690); a single ssd; a single r9 280x.

The case has an air channel from the front fan directing air flow across the graphics card (after it blows over the ssd.

All the fans have both tiny 4-pin connectors that could go into the motherboard as well as an adaptor for the large 4-pin (molex?) power connector.

Additionally, are there any suggestions on how to manage the fan on the side case? Do others with a side fan just keep the side panel close to the case when opening it up so you don't have to unplug the fan and plug it back in?

Thanks in advance for any suggestions.
 


Might want to Read The Manual for the case to see how they recommend connecting them, if it has a manual. As for the side fan, I would just plan on un-plugging it when opening up the case. I have the Sniper and even though the wires for the side fan are long, it is just easier to unplug.
Since you are concerned with cooling (a very good thing to be concerned about) I would plug the side and front into a molex connector; they'll run at full speed but move a lot of cool air into the case, and the top and rear could be connected to the mobo. Since warm/hot air rises the top and rear fan will be able to cope with the exhaust duties and you should have pretty good air flow with acceptable accoustics.
One other thought; if you want control of ALL the fans, purchase a separate fan controller for the front panel and run the fans through that, though that sound like an added expense and task IMHO.

Guess it's to early in the a.m. for continuous thought; Last thing. One of my friends buillt his PC with that case about 5 years ago. He plugged everything (fans) into the molex power directly from the PSU. He has oc'd his i7 930 on stock air cooling, has a rather warm running Radeon card, not very good air conditioning (almost none) in the PC room (summers average 90+F for about 4 months), and has never had a heat issue nor has the fan noise ever bothered him. And the PC sits on his desk just to the right of the monitor. Something else to think about when hooking up the fans.
 
Is that room for 2 fans in addition to the cpu fan? Or including the cpu fan? I would plug the rear exhaust fan and cpu cooler fan into the motherboard and use a variable speed fan controller to connect the others. There's decent ones for around $25 and that will let you control the speed of those other fans.
 


The motherboard has two chasis-fan connectors in addition to the cpu fan connector.
 


Thanks for the information and suggestions. The case manual doesn't give suggestions on where to plug in the fans. (It also doesn't say how the fans are controlled for variable speed either.)

The case has 3 x 230mm fans and 1 x 140mm. Even at full speed (plugged into power supply) they were quiet. (The power supply has a variable fan that stays off at low loads.)
 
Two ways for fan control: 1. Plug into the mobo connections and the BIOS or your other software may control fan speed. That's how my wife's PC is set up and the only time I see any fan speed control is when it is dead cold after start up; after that they pretty much run all out. Her's is kinda noisy.
2. As I mentioned, use a separate after-market fan controller; some pretty nice ones out there, but do you want - or more importantly - need that control.
If it is reasonably quiet when they are powered directly, and you have lost components to heat before, and you expect your room to be hot on occasion then let 'em run full speed. If you game with headphones, you'll never hear the case fans when they are needed the most. A little noise is a lot better then spending time and money to track down a dead component and replace it.
 
Pretty much what nostall suggested. There are software fan controllers, but like anything else that's software related the program has to stay running all the time. If there's a software glitch, fans may run slower or faster than you like. It may be a good choice if you don't want a bunch of knobs on the front of your pc.

If you don't mind knobs you can run something similar to mine - a simple 4 way (i think their current version is 6 way) fan speed controller from someone like sunbeam. No frills, just knobs that click on/off and are variable speed. Different color led's to let you know if it's under a certain voltage or over (voltage in terms of fan speed, 5v, 7v etc).

One thing I can say about the physical knobs of an external controller, the fans can be fine tuned for noise. For example one of my fans on full blast starts to produce a whine/whir sound. Only turning it down a little I get nearly the same airflow and the sound disappears completely. When I make adjustments, there's no lag like I've experienced with some software controllers. Changes are pretty much instant.