I disassembled an AMD CPU Wraith Cooler, meaning, I took the fan off of the heatsink, because I want to attach the fan on top of a Raspberry Pi that I'm using as a router. The Pi runs quite hot because it transmits several hundred megabytes per second, non stop, and I want to give it some cooling. (It already has its own heatsinks on its various chips inside the chassi and I don't want to use the little shitty Okdo fan, because it's loud.)
Is there any smart solution to how I could power this 4-pin fan? It needs 12V DC.
This is the Pi with its chassi.
And I'm considering something barbaric like this.
~~Are there perhaps conveniently positioned GPIO pins on the Pi that the 4-pin connector could just slide on to and just work?~~ Never mind this. The Pi 4 that I'm using can only output 5V:
Or would I need to cut off the 4-pin connector to expose the individual wires and attach them to a 12V DC adapter?
Or any other genuis solutions? :)
12v fans will typically run fine, albeit much slower at 5v. This was a favorite trick many moons ago to reduce fan noise in desktops before quiet fans became mainstream. The main watch out is that the fan doesn't stall at startup and fail to spin completely.
That would obviously work with older dc fans but modern ones use pwm which iirc is a constant voltage just pulsed to varying degrees (thus pulse width modulation)
Right, so less voltage, less speed. Couldn't I "shove" a potentiometer in between and give it around 7,5V or whatever gives the best noise to temp results?