Yeah, it can do damage if they draw too much power through the header and therefore blow it, possibly along with other things! If a fan says not to use the motherboard headers I personaly would not risk it!
i would not risk damaging your motherboard and other things amongst it just to get rid of some power cables....
get some 3 > 4 pin adapters and run the fans off of there. Two more sets of wires aren't going to make any mess.
if you are in the uk you can get the 3 > 4 adpaters for 70p from www.overclock.co.uk you might have to pay £7 p+p for them though. I don't know.
A good rule of thumb... If the fan says 350mA or higher, dont plug it in your MoBo. (300mA on older MoBos)
i have a Tt Volcano 6 CU+ with a monster fan spinnin at 7000+ RPM, and i got it plugged into the mobo and havent had a single problem as of yet.... works great!!!
it probably does draw that much voltage. Fans like the delta and the globalwin version of the delta draw a lot of power and sometimes it can be to much for the fan headers to cope with and they go "poof" and die.
what they should do is make them with 4 pin power adapaters and then have the 3 pin adapter just for the RPM monitoring and such if it does pose a threat to the fan header.... think they woulda thought about that before......
ive run 60mm deltas and 80mm deltas off 3 pin mobo connectors. now. i wouldnt reccomend it im jsut saying i have - get yerself an adapter as all of the cool peeps above have been saying Jono
You can always do that yourself. I did that to my mom's cpu fan. All you have to do is yank the 12v and ground wires out of the 3 pin connetor, pop a couple molex pins on them, put it in a plastic molex thang, and plug in it.
