Having read many reviews of the Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro, I was lead to believe it was very quiet. I wanted rid of my water cooling kit to make room for more drives, and this evening I sat down to fit the Freezer 64 on my AMD X2 3800+... To my horror I noticed the fan used a 4-pin connector used for PWM, a connection my DFI Lan Party SLI-DR does not cater for I knew however the 4-pin connector can be fitted on a 3-pin header, but unfortunately on the DFI the cpu fan header is placed right next to a capacitor, and thus the 4-pin does not fit So I used another 3-pin fan header on the board and it works. However. To me the fan sounds noisy, it's running at 2200rpm constantly and it keeps my X2 3800+ (overclocked to 2.4Ghz) at a very cool 32c idle. Now considering this, to me it sounds like the fan is running at full speed even though it dosn't need too. Is it because it's not on the cpu header? I know I've came from a quiet water cooling setup, but people who have this cooler say it's very quiet, and this isn't.
just cut/heatshrink the fourth wire off? Actually I ordered one to replace my boxed cooler yesterday after full workday of researching In my mobo there's the four pin connector and I really hope it can adjust the speed. You could also get a Zalman Fanmate. A bit more expensive than the wiretrick/resistor, but lets you find the sweet spot between noise and cooling power.
If you've got it connected to the header on your board, turn on the fan management (Q-fan?), in the PC Health section. It's absolutely awesome, and it controls all the fans in my case one way or another (>10 fans) and they're all silent (or close enough). Doesn't work for one of the ones on the bottom though, don't know why, but there you go tbh.
There's several different headers to choose from in there, including the Northbridge, but I think the bottom one furthest away from the backplate is automatically controlled with the CPU header, and the one closest has no form of control at all. That's only in my experience, but I'm probably wrong. I'm sure it'll be in there, I don't think it's an Expert-only feature, but I haven't used an SLi-D/DR, only this board.
The problem is the fan cable is short and only reachers 'Fan 2' header, the one that's directly above the CPU fan header... EDIT Got it sorted In the PC Health section of the bios, it allows you to set when the fan connected to the 'Fan 2' header should be fully on. The default was for it to be at full speed at temperatures above 35c. This made sense, as for the first few minutes the fan was barely audible, then it sped up to full speed. Checking MotherBoardMonitor showed that after several minutes the CPU would idle at 37c, so obviously the fan would be at full speed 99% of the time. So I changed the bios setting to 45c, and now it seems to run just under 900rpm for most of the time. Thanks for the help/suggestions guys.
Good to see you've got it sorted. It's a real improvement tbh, it was a big change from my NF3 DFI to this, as the other one didn't actually have fan control, which was a real pain.
Thanks I think I'll cut the 4th part of though, as it's currently in the 'Fan 2' header, the bios thinks it's the system fan and thus it tends to come on at full speed even if the cpu temperature is < 40c...
Well I removed the 4th unused part, and it's now conected to the cpu fan header... It works really well, very quiet. I've set the bios to bring the fan fully on at > 47c, and only when playing games for a while does it come on. An excellent cooler
@ Jipa Thanks, I imagine it would be even better when the PWM is used. I'll be buying the 775 version when I switch to Intel
