Anyone familar with the fans and wiring for dual-fan 970 and 980 GTX cards?

[BonzaiDuck]

Fishing for information before I look elsewhere, or before I inconvenience myself to remove one of my MSI GTX 970 Gaming cards. These are the "Twin-Frozr" dual-fan cards, probably no different than the dual-fan versions of EVGA or ASUS Strix.

Just looking at Egg photo gallery or popping off my sidepanel, it looks as though both fans are wired to the same connector-plug.

And I'm assuming these fans are of the 4-pin PWM type and the 12V spec.

What about the plug and pins? Are these basically the same pins, signal wire, tach wire and power leads we'd find on a motherboard 4-pin port?

I've touted PWM splitters here in previous posts, like the Swiftech 8W-PWM-SPL-ST -- a $10 item.

I'm wondering if it's possible to control an additional fan (or more) by applying the Swiftech splitter to a graphics card's fan-port.

And has anyone else tried to do such a thing? This would alleviate the graphics card of supplying power to the fans while continuing to control them through the PWM-signal wire.

 

[kasakka]

Why exactly do you feel the need to do this?

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I'm investigating "possibilities."

I'm working on a simple way to exhaust air from "Twin-Frozr" non-reference NVidia cards in SLI using the unused PCI slots above each of the cards -- removing the slot covers to provide vents. So I'm looking also at various fan alternatives to facilitate that.

If I DID introduce an extra fan in the mix, I'd want to control the fan thermally as I do with the other two pairs of fans -- from the graphics card temperatures.

 

[BonzaiDuck]

I'm pretty sure that what I want to do with the dual fans on my graphics card -- in conjunct with maybe another PWM fan -- can be done.

Still, I was hoping someone had some deeper insight about this.

The idea is to disconnect the two fans on the card from the card's fan-port, insert a PWM splitter into the mix, add another fan (or more!) with a Swiftech 8W-PWM-SPL splitter, continue to control the total of the fans from the graphics card's PWM signal, and power them from the PSU.

It's probably understandable that I got the unhelpful response from MSI: "We cannot offer advice or information about changing the card in this way." A common response.

But it's not much of a change, nor a permanent one.