simple mod for the P182/miniP180 120mm fan

dart22 · Post by **dart22** » Tue May 13, 2008 11:56 pm

I have both the mini P180 and P182, after lots of experiments I came to the conclusion that in a quite room you need the 120mm fans to be around 850~900 RBM to be really quite!
problem is that the standard tricool that comes with the case spins at arund 1000~1100 RBM and they're the molex type (why Antec !!)
I tried many 120mm fans(scythes,nexus, YateLoons, noctuna) and I can say that the retail Tricool -the sleeve version, not the B Bearing- compares well to them.
The retail Tricool also has a standard 3 pin fan header, and since most motherboards (I have both P5E, P5E-VM HDMI) has some kind of fan control you can combine the MB fan control feature and/or the The tricool switch to set the fan/s speed to desired speed. The pic above shows that the Retail Tricool switch fits perfectly in the plastic housing antec uses for the included standard Tricool !!
So if your Mb supports it, and you're willing to buy a new fan you can have more flexible tuning for your pc's acoustics

Talal

Bluefront · Post by **Bluefront** » Wed May 14, 2008 1:10 am

Well I have a retail Tri-Cool, and it refuses to start on much less than 12V, no matter what position the little switch is in. I don't know if all Tri-Cools act this way, but it stops me from using the things.

dart22 · Post by **dart22** » Wed May 14, 2008 2:02 am

Bluefront wrote:Well I have a retail Tri-Cool, and it refuses to start on much less than 12V, no matter what position the little switch is in. I don't know if all Tri-Cools act this way, but it stops me from using the things.

I tryed 2 samples of retail Tricools -sleeve type- and they work down to around 8 volts. I also tried the Zalman fanmate 2 and theyll start from 40% of its range and upwards, my mother board can slowthem down to 700 RBM (when the switch is on the L position) which is bretty quite IMO

alphabetbackward · Post by **alphabetbackward** » Wed May 14, 2008 8:01 am

I bought a Tricool LED since it was on sale locally; can't remember if it was sleeve or ball bearing and I have it on my CPU fan header on low. If the temperature was low enough it wouldn't start but when it did start up, it would spin at ~300 RPM and increase to...I think 900.