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? :)
You can buy usb to 12v fan adapters for like $8 on Amazon.
But for a pi you don't need that fan to run at full speed, just the 5V of USB or that header + any sort of a heatsink on the CPU will be plenty.
5V seems to the consensus, so I'll go in that direction. But I do want to keep the chassi on, so I think I'll go with a 5V USB.