Building a Green Windows Home Server: Fan Configuration
Friday, November 7, 2008 – 7:24 PMSomeone asked me exactly how I configured the fans on my WHS to run really quietly. The previous post on this didn’t have sufficient detail so here’s some more wiring information.
| Item | Description |
| F | Front fan (pulls air out) |
| B | Rear fan (sucks air in) |
| C | CPU fan(s) |
| D | Display connector |
| 1 | 4 pin CPU FAN |
| 2 | 3 pin SYS FAN connector |
This case is a little odd as the front fan cannot be reversed to air flows back to front not the usual front to back.
How it’s wired up
- The front fan (F) is connected to the CPU FAN socket (1)
- The black/yellow jumper cable from F is connected to the display (D)
- The rear fan (R) is daisy chained on the F cable
- The black/yellow jumper cable from R is connected to the display (2)
- The CPU fan (C) is daisy chained on the F cable behind R
Note: This is based on the hardware I used for my Windows Home Server build and yours may vary somewhat. I’m not an expert on this! I spent a lot of time mucking around with it but if I’m completely honest I couldn’t tell you why this works better than other configurations I tried but it does. If I did this again I would try and get all four pin fans and things would be much easier.
The previous post shows the BIOS settings I’m using. The trick here is to set the fan controller such that the CPU fan is just ticking over and the other fans are off unless the temperature starts to rise.
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7 Responses to “Building a Green Windows Home Server: Fan Configuration”
Ade, thanks. That helps a bit.
I, too, went with a 3-pin CPU fan and a traditional setup of the rear case fan connected to the SYS FAN connection. No front case fan (yet). Running at 100% the CPU fan was fairly loud. With some bios tweaks (setting it to run at 50% with CPU under 50 degrees C) I was able to make the CPU much quieter. I’m actually going to tweak it a bit more (down to 40%) because the CPU never seems to go above 30 degrees C even under decent load.
But after quieting the CPU fan I now notice the sound from the rear case fan. Don’t get me wrong the Home Server computer as a whole is much quieter than any other PC in my office, but I’d like to hush it just a bit more. I was thinking about daisy chaining the case fan with the cpu fan so it, too, would run at 50% (or 40%) unless needed.
I was wondering if I should just manually splice the wires or go with some kind of splitter. I would assume with both of them being 3-wire setups that all 3 of them should be spliced together? But maybe I should just pull power and ground for the case fan from the CPU FAN and have the display line for the case fan go back to the SYS FAN connection. I guess I’ll test it out a bit and see how things work out.
Thanks again.
By Dan Hounshell on Nov 8, 2008
Dan,
I did some searching on this and realy couldn’t find clear instructions anywhere on how these things should be wired up. If anyone is reading this and really understands how to configure the fan then please post here.
You can get fan cable splitters like this one:
Rosewill RCW-310 12″ /Fan Power Y Cable
In the end I tried a lot of permutations and this one worked the best for me but I couldn’t say I’m completely clear as to why.
Sorry I can’t provide a more definitive answer.
Ade
By Ade Miller on Nov 9, 2008