PC Fans with LED's - Page 1
Forum section: electronics / projects

author: raptor1956
author_rank: Frequent Contributor
timestamp: September 30, 2016, 02:50:14 am
content: I modified my PC by adding a couple more fans and a Gelid Solutions Fan control panel that can monitor 6 temps and control the speed of 6 fan or fan groups. Prior to the mod the 7 fans were driven as follows: 2x 200mm intake fans with blue LED's at the front controlled by the fan controller that came with the Thermaltake Core V71 case, 1x 200mm exhaust fans with blue LED's at the top also controlled by the case fan controller, 2x 120mm fans acting as push exhaust fans for the Corsair H100i CPU cooler radiator and controlled by the Corsair unit but plugged into the motherboard, 1x 120mm fan acting as push exhaust fan for the EVGA GeForce 980Ti Hybrid GPU cooler radiator mounted to the back, and finally a 120mm fan with blue LED's at the bottom acting as a pull intake fan and plugged into the motherboard. With this configuration 3 fans were controlled by the case fan controller, 2 fans were controlled by the Corsair H100i though powered from the motherboard, 1 fan was controlled and powered by the GPU and 1 fan was controlled and powered by the motherboard directly.So, since I do a fair amount of rendering of 4K video and the system can churn at nearly 100% with over-clocking for 30 minutes or more I decided to add a bit more cooling. Basically one more 200m fan with blue LED's at the top and one more 120mm fan with blue LED's at the bottom. The 2 fans for the Corsair CPU cooler and the 1 for the GPU cooler are controlled by themselves so I had 6 fans to be controlled by the 6 channel Gelid unit -- should be fine right. I mounted one temp sensor as a free air temp sensor in the case near the HD cage. I mounted another to the CPU radiator and one to the GPU radiator. I attached one to the Samsung 950 Pro PCIe SSD as that sucker can get quite hot and the final two were attached to the two 6TB HD's. The fan configuration for the Gelid is: 1=front top, 2=front bottom, 3=top front, 4-top back, 5=bottom front, and 6=bottom back.OK, with all of that out of the way I power up and I'm only able to read fan speed on one fan, #5. Also, only three of the six fans with LED's are lit up -- that is, the LED's on half the fans don't work. Oddly, all six fans work and I can change speed manually even though only one is reporting speed. OK, so I then plug the three original 200mm fans with LED's back into the case fan controller and now the LED's don't work even with the case fan controller.So, I'm a bit puzzled here as hooking up fans isn't exactly rocket science and I know I made no mistake doing it -- the fans worked though the LED's did not. I suspect the Gelid unit may be AFU but I'm not sure how to explain why the fans work but the LED's no longer do and no matter how they're powered. Even powering from my bench PS has the fan with working LED's working with the PS but the fans with LED's that no longer work also do not work from the bench PS.One final point ... all the fans in question are Thermaltake fans with 3 pins which should be + and - power and tach. The new fans are the same as the old fans, in fact they are the same model of 200mm and 120mm fans and have exactly the same pinouts. Lastly, I built this PC back in January and have had no major issues until now.I apologize for being long winded, but I wanted to be as complete as possible.Brian