Fans, 3pin-4pin Question

[Leonidas]

i am considering upgrading my case fans and buying a handful of 120x38mm fans, but most appear to be 4-pin fans, does this mean molex bigazz connectors? and can i buy a fan controller for these? sorry if any of these are stupid questions, right now im running 4 80(x25 i think)mm fans in my case. thanks again in advance everyone... and have you seen this bigass fans 158 CFM on some of em, F'in amazing.

 

[Nubius]

yes the 4pin is the 'bigazz connectors' Usually they it's pass through though so it doesn't actually take up one of your connectors...you plug in a 4pin from the PSU to the fan and the fan has another Male end molex connector to plug into another device. Also some fan controllers are different than others so it depends on whether they take 4pin or 3pin. My sunbean rheobus fan controller uses a 4pin for power and then you plug the fans into 3pin connectors, there's 4 of the pins for 4 differen't channels for fans to be on. at places like www.svc.com they also have 4pin to 3pin convertors and vice versa

The Sunbeam Rheobus fan controller works great and has 20watt per channel rating. I have a total of 9 case fans spread out along the 4 channels and it handles it superbly so not only can you use the controller to operate any fan you want you can hook up multiples as long as you don't exceed the wattage rating for the channel

 

[Leonidas]

what is the rating of your PSU tho? mine is kinda shitty at the moment, dont know how it runs what ive got...

 

[Nubius]

in my sig, Thermaltake 560w PurePower PSU with a +12v rail of 22a, the +3.3v is 35a I believe and the +5v rail is 30a but I don't remember offhand. If you don't have a good strong +12v rail then you shouldn't run a lot of fans and such