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Página 5 de 6 Testing
Considering that the 3 pin plug of each of these fans has the sole purpose of reporting the speed, its use, however, is not essential for them to work correctly. This is something extra that many users will benefit form and others won’t consider it important. Taking that into account, the tests were carried out with a motherboard with three 3-pin sockets with RPM sensor (many motherboards’ 3 pin sockets make the fans spin, but they are not capable of measuring RPM), as one of our goals was to know the status of each fan in every moment. The installation is very simple and the cords’ length is enough for any standard PC. This may not be enough for full tower cases, but a point was reached to avoid the annoying and messy wiring in regular cases.
The procedure itself was even easier and more effective than expected. It was necessary just to configure the PWM control in the BIOS for the system to work perfectly. It’s easy to appreciate in these charts how the 4 fans (3 Arctic Fan PWM plus the cooler Stock’s fan) work totally in sync and harmony with the processors’ temperature. It is also possible to see sudden halts of the fans that later started to work normally. This happened because the spinning was stopped manually to observe how the graphic responded to this event. In some moments, the reported speed was zero, since the RPM the Arctic Fan 12 PWM was spinning at (see red curve) was lower than what the motherboard can report without implying it was stopped. This was noticeable at first sight, while the fan was spinning very slowly, and obviously that coincided with an idle processor in a cool environment. When the cooler (see blue curve) was manually stopped, it was enough for the temperature to rise and the fans to begin spinning faster, making the Arctic Fan 12 PWM possible to be measured by the motherboard. It’s only necessary to put the processor at FULL LOAD or just obstruct the air passage of its fan to make the temperature rise quickly, which turns immediately into an increase of the fans’ speed. We can configure in the motherboard’s BIOS the temperatures we want the fans to work at its top capacity. This is shown in different work levels, since if it is configured with a high temperature, the fans will spin at low speed most of the time. While if the chosen temperature is low, the fans will reach rapidly their higher speed. This effect can be seen clearly in the following 2 charts where the BIOS was configured with different temperatures, obtaining striking differences in the behavior.
Note on plugs: Looking in detail at the 4 pin plug and comparing it with the 3 pin plug, it’s not difficult to notice that it’s possible to plug the first one in a 3 pin socket in the motherboard. If we did this, the fan would spin (with a speed that will depend particularly on each fan), but the PWM capacities will disappear completely. To satisfy our curiosity, we decided to install the fans in this way, watching closely they worked at top speed.
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