Hey all, I have a new X58 board on the way soon (Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD5) and I'm planning to use it in a rebuild of my WC'd main rig. I'm going to be using two radiators in the system, a 3x120 and a 2x120. I want the system to be quiet, so constantly-high fan speeds are out of the question and manually changing fan voltages with rheostats does my head in, so I want to run as many of the fans daisy-chained off the motherboard fan headers as I safely can. I've got 2x 0.15A fans running off a single header in my current system without any problems, but I'm planning to use 0.35A Zalman FM-3 fans in the rebuild, so I'm concerned about the current. I'm hoping to connect 3 fans to one header and 2 to another for BIOS/Software control of fan speeds. I contacted Gigabyte and asked them what the safe max. rating for the fan headers on the board is and they said: I'm inclined to trust the manufacturer when it says that the headers are rated for 4 Amps, but I can't help but think that's a very high number when people generally recommend daisy-chaining no more than 2 fans to a single header for fear of burning out the header. Is the quoted 4A likely to be a rating of the ICs for the given header, or do you think the plug/header itself can handle that much current? 3x 0.35A fans is still just 1.05A in total, but I want to be sure I don't burn out the headers on a new board. If powering those 3 fans from a single header isn't going to be safe, could anyone give me a rough idea of a molex-powered circuit I could use to take the voltage from a fan header and power 3-5 fans according to the voltage given by the header but with the actual supply coming from the Molex power? I don't want to use a retail fan controller as I don't want manual control and I'd rather take my temperatures from the mobo than from fiddly probes. I'm not opposed to doing some modding or electronics if I have to.
You can daisy-chain some Arctic PWM fans, running the fan power from a molex and the control signal from a 4-pin PWM mobo header, and with a bit of re-wiring you can probably do that on any 4-pin PWM fan; take the power from a molex and just the switching control signal (pin4) from the board. Note on that board only the CPU header has thermal control. That 4A figure is very high, and I don't see why they've added 250V and the AC/DC shite. Could be what the headers will take as connectors per se and not what the board chips can supply. I wouldn't trust Gigabyte to have given you the answer you need.
Never saw those before, I think they'll fit the bill nicely. That's exactly what I was thinking - I figured the data they gave me were from a spec sheet and not specific to my query. I'll get some of the AC fans and see how it goes. Thanks!
