I'm not sure I'd be willing to give up a PCI slot for a fan. Perhaps most people would rather replace the cooler on their graphics card.

just to be clear, the pwm controller would use a physical potentiometer for the settings? not using the pci bus right?

feipoa wrote:

I'm not sure I'd be willing to give up a PCI slot for a fan. Perhaps most people would rather replace the cooler on their graphics card.

AGP slots tend to share IRQ with the first PCI slot, so usually you don't wanna use that.
And PCI systems tend to have a load of ISA slots for soundcards and NIC's.
I guess if you are going for a V2 SLI setup they could become scarce.

It would'nt be a solution for every system for sure.

.legaCy wrote:

just to be clear, the pwm controller would use a physical potentiometer for the settings? not using the pci bus right?

No idea ! just speculating here.
I mean regarding fancontrol i guess only the imagination sets the limits.
Tho I personally like "set and forget" solutions.

Well, for one, just hooking up a fan to draw power from a PCI slot would most likely introduce a whole lot of noise to the PCI bus. You would need to have something with some filtering capacitors on it to make sure it doesn't screw with other stuff in the system. Plus if it shorts out.. which I have seen happen, you could fry the motherboard.

Cost to produce is probably the main reason that they all the ones that were sold commercially used molex connectors.

I had a Zalman one a few years ago, but like most molex-powered ones it was nothing special

http://zalman.com/contents/products/view.html?no=412

cyclone3d wrote:

Well, for one, just hooking up a fan to draw power from a PCI slot would most likely introduce a whole lot of noise to the PCI bus. You would need to have something with some filtering capacitors on it to make sure it doesn't screw with other stuff in the system. Plus if it shorts out.. which I have seen happen, you could fry the motherboard.

Cost to produce is probably the main reason that they all the ones that were sold commercially used molex connectors.

Yea it would obviously be more expensive then what is basically just a fan =)
But it cant be that complicated (or expensive) to filter out the noise ?
Then again I'm obviously not an electronics expert.

In my mind its just a very neat and cool (...) solution !
Tho even a bare PCB with a fan cutout that just uses the slot for mounting would be neater then whats already out there.

PC Hoarder Patrol wrote:

I had a Zalman one a few years ago, but like most molex-powered ones it was nothing special

Zalman zm-sc100.jpg

http://zalman.com/contents/products/view.html?no=412

Wow !
How could I miss that one !

...And ofc discontinued since long.

But for the right price 😲 😲 😲 (has better shots of the PCB)

https://www.ebay.com/itm/ZALMAN-ZM-SC100-PCI- … ng/143137509932

Ouch, 25 euro.

These "PCI fans" trying to move air while being sandwiched are more for the looks than for actual cooling.

Some better cases have fans that blow air through inbetween the cards.
If you don't have such one, there is only the way of improvising.
You can place a blower fan that way that it cools mobo and cards as well.
I have done this in my 486 to keep the rare, hard-to-find hardware alive as long as possible.
These small 4-5cm server fans consisting of two nested fans that each rotate in the opposite direction are highly efficient for that. The ones I use are 4cm diameter, and are rated 0.8 amps at 12V. They offer strong airflow at very small size.
I'll make and post photos later today.

Definitely nothing for "silent computing" fanatics 😀

i just built one with a 120mm fan , pieces of plastic and metal bracket, and some epoxy for my lianli itx. but not pci powered

a nicer solution would be 3d printer

All the PCI fans I have seen have plastic where the card edge usually goes and use molex or 3 pin fans. If paired with a passively cooled card, like a voodoo 3, I think its perfectly acceptable. I don't see much advantage from drawing power from the PCI slot when you can just as easily chain them with molex.

Linus Tech Tips recently posted a video and they had a "pci" cooler that was molex powered and had speed control.

Putting a spinning magnet millimeters from electrical components seems like a bad idea. I had two PCI cards malfunction after being mounted next to one of these PCI fans (Akasa brand). I'm not sure that was the cause of the problem, but it made me suspicious of them, and I never used them again.

When I want to cool PCI cards I mount a fan above them.

Errius wrote:

Putting a spinning magnet millimeters from electrical components seems like a bad idea. I had two PCI cards malfunction after being mounted next to one of these PCI fans (Akasa brand). I'm not sure that was the cause of the problem, but it made me suspicious of them, and I never used them again.

When I want to cool PCI cards I mount a fan above them.

What about cards such as video cards that have fans built on them?

The sad excuses for magnets in those little fans should not be enough to mess with components that are close to them.

It's not like they are neodymium.

cyclone3d wrote:

What about cards such as video cards that have fans built on them?

At these low voltages nearby fans' inductive "input" can have noticeable effects.
On graphics cards there is usually a metallic cooler that shields the GPU.

Anyway, I don't think that sandwiched fans are particularly effective.
So my ISA retro PC looks this way:

In the middle you see an Adda fan (shielded by a metallic heatsink) keeping the chipset cool.
In the lower right you see another small but not weak fan (12V 0.8A) that takes care of keeping processor and cards cold.