Warning on fan controllers.

[Knipex]

For somw reason I never really warmed to fan controllers and was a confirmed user of the 7V mod with a drawer full of home made molex 12V to 7V and 12V to 5V adaptors. I had used a fan bus (similar to the one given away by the great satan) powering extra case fans. This however was only used to turn on extra fans during gaming sessions in hot envoirnments (read lans).

However when I won a Coolermaster Aerogate 2 and was rebuilding the bezel on my machine for the mod fest I decided to use it to controll all my fans, the two on the raditor and the 120mm fan I had modded onto my power supply. Up untill recently while unimpressed with it (fans allways turn on at full speed and need to be individually adjusted to low speed) I had no reall reason to complain.

Now however I dont think I will ever agan use a fan controller.

Last Tuesday I was going on a work trip for a few days and decided to take the opertunity to do a complete virus scan, defrag and disk clean up on all my hardrives so I set them up to run in rotation, turned off my monitors set all the fans to low speed (so as not to annoy my better half while I was gone) put my passport in my pocket and left for the airport.

On my return I was surprised to find the PC turned off but just assumed that herself had done so. I started it up, reset all the fans to low speed and settled down for some gaming. After about an hour I noticed a strange smell and went to investigate. Fairly soon I discovered that all the fans on my PC had stopped working leaving me with a passive rad with NO airflow and a PSU with no airflow.:blink:

The PSU was hot enough to burn me :eek: so I pulled the plug. Upon opening the case I found that my water temps were VERY high. My Aquadrive (holding my 74gig raptor) was mounted between my DVD writer and my DVD drive and was very warm to the touch and the two optical drives were acting as heatsinks.......... The grill over my rad was actually hot to the touch... not warm HOT....

I allowed it all to cool for a while before disconecting the motherboard and shorting out the PSU to power the fans (luckily the PSU still worked). Once airflow had been restored temperatures dropped pretty fast so I powered it all up again and upon doing some testing discovered that after a while at low speed the fan controller seemed to shut down stopping all fans...

Now however my PSU is giving me some eratic voltages and my once stable machine is now locking up at a moments notice. I have a suspicion that my motherboard has been affected as I have having some problems that I cannot entirely blame on power issues and lord knows what the heat has done to the life exptancy of my raptor let alone my Baracude drives...

It could have been worse I suppose but now I need to get a new single fan PSU and modify it to fit my case and see what other damage has been done..... :rant: :rant:

[fillip]

Shit man, that's awful. Guess you havent bothered contacting Coolermaster about it to see if it's a common fault?

Fingers crossed nothing else is damaged, i s'pose this is more of an issue to do with a complex, manufactured fan controller, as a very basic home made rheostat is gonna just turn itself off because you want the fans running silently.

[Starbuck3733T]

Ouch man! Now I'm glad I had that incident w\ goliath where it ran passive for several hours - and did exactly what its supposed to do. critical water temp hit, fans to full, and 15 minutes later we're back to normal.

[mnpctech]

Damn, I hope everything works out alright.

Keep us updated on what you find out from CM :h34r:

[Nexxo]

That totally sucks. Get onto Coolermaster's warranty dept. :rant:

I must admit that I always have been suspicious of added complexity... <_< Metaversa is designed for the fans to run at full tilt, all the time, hence the choice of quiet Panflos. Just fire up and forget.

[FastRedPonyCar]

I just bought vantec stealths so I wouldn't have to worry about fan speed.


But that sucks to hear about your misfortune. :mellow: Definately makes me double think those things.

[toby]

nasty, i would be very very annoyed! thats why i always build my own controlers, because if it goes wrong its my fault, which leaves me feeling less frustrated but more of an idiot lol!I have a coolermaster musketeer and it does pretty much nothing, i do like the leds on the front tho!

[Psykotik]

It's a common occurence if the amount of complaints I have read about it are any indication (I have a black Aerogate II myself)

I have left all critical fans (CPU, NB, PSU) to their own devices, and simply have my chassis fans rigged up to it, but it's all good for me so far.

Damn buddy, hope it all gets sorted (If the retailer don't wanna know ,head over to the CM forums and speak to Bryant Nguyen (Bigbadbns) if you want to know the warranty score, he'll probably put you in touch with Ron at CM Europe in the Netherlands if you can't RMA the unit)

[Knipex]

It appears to be a common enough fault. Coolermaster have told me to return it for a replacement but seeing as the face plate is painted I dont think that is goibg to work!!!

Anyway I would never trust one again.........

Let this be a warning to you all.