I'm planning on doing a few noise-friendly mods to my PC this summer- on the list was a speed control to the 120mm fan cooling my rad.
It's a Panaflo L1A- but I swear it's defective or something as it is louder than I think it should be. I might pick up a new one since they're not terribly expensive- but this is besides the point.
I read around and saw a few ways of doing what I wanted- Please post comments on your experience using any of the methods I will list- or post better methods if you have them.
1. Rheostat- kind of crude but gives me variable speed control. Variable control is not too critical to me- a "hi" and a "lo" would suffice for my needs. The rheostat would also heat up throwing evil heat into our case.
2. Hooking up some switch to either supply 12V or 7V, depending on what position it was in.
2a. One way to do this is to make one circut with the standard 12V, and have another circut using the +12 and +5 to make 7. I guess this is the general way of making 7V- but I heard it's not so healthy on the PSU? Comments please.
2b. The other way I came up with was to wire it so that a resistor would be added into the circut if the switch was in the "low" position, this way 5V would be dropped across the resistor so 7V was left to go through the fan- it would be tricky to measure the value of the resistor I would need, and the resistor would also heat up and we all know what our #1 enemy is!
3. Are there any kind of IC's or transistors that would accomplish this task? I was thinking this way I could use a small switch (i.e. a keyboard film switch) to use so that the current to the fan did not have to go through the switch (thus requiring a hefty switch).
So there you have it. If you have any other ideas on how to create 7V and 12V, please post! Thanks for reading!
Ruahrc
Linear Mode
