PWM or voltage regulation for 120mm fans?

[greeef]

I've been advised againt running my 120mm fans from the motherboard headers (and abit NF7) on current issues. Mine are evercools, rated at 0.28A, so that seems reasonable.

Currently they're at 5V and audible, but i've had them down to 3 and they get very quiet.

Anyway, i thought pwm would be better as it would introduce a couple of watts less heat into the case, but it seems most people here use a liner regulator.

pwm controller with temperature control

I was planning on using this to turn fans and lighting on and off, possibly every switch on the pc. as well. Any ideas on how to integrate it for manual fan control? maybe a volume-control-on-a-chip?

griff

*edited links

[greeef]

nobody even have a preference between PWM and regulated voltage? What about rheoststs?

[Becks]

Well.. your evercool fans won't work well with PWM.. unless you are willing to switch fans there isn't really a choice . Nexus and Globe fans are the only ones that I know of that have no issues at all with PWM. All other fans I've tried end up with some amount of clicking noise. (Not to say those are the only ones, just you can't randomly choose a fan to use with PWM.) PWM does end up with the benefit of no heat and a greater range of rpms-- ie alot of fans stop turning <5v but PWM you can go down to <10%.... if you're willing to do the extra work PWM is great.

[ferdb]

it all depends on the fan, a few fans work fine with pwm and don't generate much additional noise, others are awful and voltage regulation is the only acceptable solution with those. At least with voltage regulation you don't have to worry about introducing any additional noise sources.

[greeef]

thanks for your answers, i was hoping somebody might know if evercool reacted well to pwm. Voltage regulation it is.

griff