High-end motherboards offer 4-6 or even more of these 4-pin fan/pump connectors, and the PWM system is a very effective and smart way to control the fans. Every mainstream motherboard that leaves the factory today is equipped with at least one 4-pin PWM header.

It was followed by the use of ordinary resistors to slow the fans down, fans equipped with thermal resistors, various potentiometers for a wide range manual speed control, etc.īut nowadays, if you want to control the speed of your fans and pumps, PWM control is the way to go. If you are to stumble upon an abbreviation that you don’t understand, take a peek at our “ Liquid cooling glossary” page and you just might find the correct answer!Ĥ-pin PWM header can automatically control the speed of your fans and pumps.Įarly homemade fan controllers used a simple “volt mod” by choosing 5, 7 or 12V from a classic molex connector. TDP stands for “Thermal Design Power” and it is the maximum amount of heat generated by the processor. From that time and up until now, the computer power consumption and thermal dissipation have grown exponentially, as well as their performance.įrom the very first Pentium processors that were declared at 7W TDP, and all the way down to the modern day AMD FX 9590 processor that is rated at 220W, the cooling also had its own evolutionary path. The early x86 computers did not have active cooling because not much heat was generated, right until the introduction of the first 486 models. The option of controlling the fan speed and the satisfaction of silent computing were not always present when it comes to personal computers. Customer Support Knowledge database, support tickets.

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Computer fan speed controller