this post was submitted on 16 Jan 2026
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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? :)

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[–] emotional_soup_88@programming.dev 1 points 1 day ago (1 children)

I just found a "noise reduction cable" from Noctua. It ads 51 Ohms. I have no idea how to calculate what the new voltage would be on a 12V 2A DC power supply ( https://www.noctua.at/en/products/nv-ps1/specifications ), but Noctua's website says that the cable lowers fan speeds, so I'll give it a try.

[–] Romkslrqusz@lemmy.zip 3 points 22 hours ago

Yeah, it’s just an inline resistor

A potentiometer is a resistor that you adjust using a dial. If you want control, you may want to get a PWM fan control module. There’s the Noctua NA-FC1 https://www.noctua.at/en/products/na-fc1 but that’s pretty much just a fancy expensive version, you can find the same concept for as little as $1-2 USD