4 pin vs. 3 pin

[IFICUDIWUD]

I just bought a pal 8045 with a panaflow fan in a kit from 2cooltek and just realized my mobo has 3 pin fan connections and this fan has a 4 pin connector. Im kinda new at this but have been studying these forums as this will be my first build.. My ???? is what do i do to use this fan on my mobo.. its an ecs k7s5a,, will be running a 1600xp w/256 crucial ddr mounted in an elight 7237 w/340w psu
also will be trying to use an diamond viperIII s540 32 mb video card.. thats all ive bough so far and am boning up on hard drives next..

 

[2336]

That 4-pin connector will connect to any P/S conection. The only problem is you won't be able to monitor the rpm, and the fan may not have that capability anyway. You could swap the fan for another with a 3-pin, 3-wire connector but be careful. Some of the more powerful fans, such as the Deltas, draw enough juice that they eventually burn out the motherboard fan header. I didn't listen to this advice about 2 years ago and burned out the fan header on an MSI-6309. There is a way around this. Look up a trader here with the username of GiZzo. He makes custom fan adapter rigs. It allows you to use a 4-pin P/S connector to power the fan and it has one wire (rpm sensor) with a 3-pin connector so you can plug it into the motherboard fan header and monitor rpm without burning anything out. Neat setup!

 

[Logix]

Wow, that's pretty cool. I'll have to send GiZzo a PM. I have a Delta 60mm that started out spinning at 6700 RPMs... Over the months, it kept dropping until it eventually went down to 5900 RPM and then the fan died, or at least I thought it did. I plugged the Delta back into another 3-pin plug on my motherboard and it's back to 6700 RPM now.

I thought about getting a 3-to-4 PIN adapter so that I wouldn't burn out anymore plugs on my mobo, but I didn't want to lose the RPM readings. I guess this will solve both problems.

Thanks for the info, 2336! 🙂