In the articles about connecting the front panel and turn on the board without a button, we touched the question of contact connections for connecting the periphery. Today we want to tell about one particular, which is signed as Pwr_fan.
What is this contact and what to connect to them
Contacts with the name PWR_FAN can be found almost on any motherboard. Below is one of the options for this connectivity.
To understand that you need to connect to it, let us study the name of the contacts in more detail. "PWR" is an abbreviation from Power, in this context "Power". "FAN" means "fan". Therefore, we make a logical output - this site is designed to connect the power supply fan. In the old and some modern BP there is a highlighted fan. It can be connected to a motherboard, for example, in order to monitor or adjust the speed.
However, most power supplies have such an opportunity. In this case, an additional body cooler can be connected to PWR_FAN contacts. Additional cooling may be required for computers with powerful processors or video cards: the more productive the hardware, the stronger it is heated.
As a rule, the PWR_FAN connector consists of 3 points - Pins: Earth, power supply and contact control sensor.
Note that there is no fourth PIN, which is responsible for controlling the speed of rotation. This means that the fan turnover connected to these contacts will not work either through the BIOS or from under the operating system. However, on some advanced coolers there is such an opportunity, but implemented through additional connections.
In addition, you need to be attentive and with meals. 12V is fed to the corresponding contact in PWR_FAN, but on some models it is only 5V. From this value, the speed of rotation of the cooler depends: in the first case, it will spin faster, which is positively affected by the quality of cooling and negatively on the fan operation. In the second - the situation is exactly the opposite.
In conclusion, we want to note the last feature - although it is possible to connect a cooler from the processor to PWR_FAN, it is not recommended to do this: the BIOS and the operating system will not be able to control this fan, which can lead to errors or breakage.