Martin Rosenfeld wrote:
> After installing a new motherboard and processor I still had a perfectly 
> good and venerated Socket A MB, CPU and memory. I got a cheep case and, 
> using a retired power supply and some old hard drives, built a spare 
> computer system. The PS is a Coolmax of 460 watt capacity. The PS fan 
> now makes a louder noise than I remember it doing in the past.

Not surprising - it's only the latest gear that's addressed the new 
trend in "quiet" or "silent" computing.  Also, with a
used supply, 
there's bound to be some dust in the fan bearing that's probably causing 
some noise.  I have no personal experience with that particular supplier.

> The MB has three 3-pin male sockets for fans, one labeled CPU, one 
> system fan, and one just fan. The first two have the pins marked +, -, 
> and sensor. The third has + and -, but NC for the third pin (which I 
> suppose means no connection). A problem is that the CPU fan has two 
> female plugs, on with + and - leads, and a single wire cable with the 
> sensor lead. I plugged this in to the MB receptacles for CPU and System 
> fans.

Please clarify:  There's a single female plug with a + and - (red and 
black), and a second plug with a single wire (probably yellow)?  If so - 
why not plug them all onto the same male header on the motherboard?

With the end of the female plug facing away from you, and the alignment 
tabs pointing down, the wires are black, red and "colour" - in some fans 
they're yellow, others are blue.

If there's TWO + and - leads from the CPU fan, it likely requires a 
secondary power connection, or has a separate controller for the fan 
speed - a rheostat.  I've only ever seen this on a ThermalTake Volcano 
9, which also had a temperature probe to attach _under_ the CPU, if you 
wanted to use that instead of the rheostat.

 > I now have nowhere to plug in the single wire sensor lead from the
> PS. Could that be why it is always so loud? Should I splice it into the 
> sensor lead of the CPU's fan?

The sensor lead simply allows the monitor chip on the motherboard to 
monitor the speed of the attached fan - so it knows if it's going too 
slow to provide proper cooling, or not spinning at all.

It's very important that you do NOT splice these together, as the sensor 
chip will likely wind up with an unusable signal to monitor.

The BIOS would report a bad fan at bootup, or pass this info through to 
a monitoring program running under your chosen OS, if there is one (and 
it's a supported monitoring chip).

With three wires from the CPU fan onto just the CPU header, that frees 
up the SYSTEM header for the power supply fan's monitor cable - and you 
would put it on the rightmost male pin if the alignment tab on the 
motherboard header was on the bottom, for example.

The FAN header would be for an unmonitored fan, since there's only two 
pins available.


Hope this helps!

-Derek


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