My DIY fan controller

[xen]

So I went ahead and crafted my first (easiest, safest) voltage controller.



Erm, this is a picture with its internals open.

But all I can offer at this point is the complete overview picture of this graphics card:



Not all pictures are as good:



It's so unsharp it gives you a headache...

Anyway I got myself some tools...



And some soldering equipment...



The rest, as they say, I s history.

I used a TO-220 package 7808, as you can see on the pictures. This is simply a converter that will dynamically lower resistance depending on the load, to ensure a fixed and constant resistance of in this case 8 V (7808). It's not more difficult than that.

The wiring is simply:

Code: Select all

fan |  r -------------->  |  | <-
    |  b -------------->  |  | <--------------> b
    |                     |  | ---------------> y

To my dismay the shrink-wrap set I had ordered on ly had big stuff in it, and the smallest one was too big for those single wires. Still not as ugly, but not as nice either.

I... slightly burned (sooted) on of the connectors (at the fan) ans for this I am not happy .\

I used a ready-made cheapest-available 2-wire female (fan) plug hence the yellow wire on it.

That yellow wire is just 12V, not signaling.

[xen]

Here is a close-up of the result at the card (in the computer):



The shrink-wrap looks like a half-hard dick, which is why I don't like it.

But as you can see I have just taken 2 wires out of the 4-pin housing and put it into my own 2-pin housing and connected it to the fan controller with a 2-pin header.

I don't have a good picture of the computer yet as it's too dark.

As I said in the other thread,....

This card has a minimum fan speed of 1580 RPM, and normally this is called "43%" in GPU-Z.

I did also mod the BIOS to allow for lower fan speeds but I am not sure it did anything because my fan kept stuck at 1580 RPM so any diverse reading you get now is a percentage of the maximum value you have configured in the BIOS (in the ROM).

Irrelevant for the rest of it.

This is also why I performed this mod, because the BIOS mod had not changed a thing for this card.

In an open case the fan stays 860 (860 is the new default speed!!!) until about 50 degrees Celcius and then ramps up to 1275 RPM at 66 degrees. But in my open case, which would usually have less effective airflow, the card never goes higher than 66 degrees under Furmark so I must wonder why the hell those designers opted for ridiculously loud fan speeds.

Is it because they wanted to sell more Gaming cards?

[xen]

No responses, lol? Did I do something so stupid?

[CA_Steve]

Nice DIY.