insp1re2600 Posted December 6, 2020 Share Posted December 6, 2020 So i replaced the ml140s that came with the cooler with a couple of noctua nf-a14 chromax industrial 2000rpm fans, connected them up to the aio and they dont seem to spin or be recognized by the aio, i dont believe the watt or volts are too different to not work. i ended up running the fans off my corsair commander, but ideally be nice to keep these seperate. any ideas? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
c-attack Posted December 6, 2020 Share Posted December 6, 2020 Afraid it may be more than that. There are a series of European designed PWM fans that do not react well on Corsair controllers. The most notable have been the Noctua Industrial 3000 rpm series, EK Vardar with the "ER" feature, and BeQuiet SW2/3 PWM. It's not all European fans (all my Noiseblockers work), but usually some that have some PWM peculiarities. BeQuiets always had a strange PWM % curve. However, it's often the Commander Pro that is on the short end as it uses RPM as the control vs PWM %. This has been less common on most of the coolers that do use PWM %. I missed the Chromax as a possible as I ran them from my Commander and don't have a Platinum/XT cooler to test them. They are on the list now. I don't think you have another option besides swapping fans. There is nothing wrong with running the fans from the Commander. The only circumstance where it might be an issue is if there was an issue on boot (total pump fail). You would not have software response to that until the OS and CUE loaded, whereas on the AIO controller the fans would ramp up within seconds as the coolant around the block sensor skyrocketed. However, this makes you no different than all of use that run custom water cooling and need to control fans from something else. Besides coolant temp through the software, the other control option is to use one of the temp probes and run it to the exhaust side of the radiator. Exhaust air temp will mirror coolant temp in most circumstances and makes for a good control variable. The Commander can read its probes at all times, software running or not. However, this does not solve the 'fail on boot' issue since the warm coolant would never get to the radiator. It does make for a better choice if you spend a lot of time without the software running (other OS environments, serial bench tester, etc.). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
insp1re2600 Posted December 6, 2020 Author Share Posted December 6, 2020 what exactly are you saying? the noctua industrial pwm are not cheapo fans, and its like for like 2000rpm same as the ml140s, this cooler is supposed to support pwm fans, not sure why it wouldnt? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
c-attack Posted December 6, 2020 Share Posted December 6, 2020 There apparently is some wiggle room within the PWM spec and the XT controller cannot effectively communicate with the Chromax motor. The overwhelming majority of fans work from absurdly expensive to $2 knockoffs, but there is a short list of fans that do not respond to PWM commands from some Corsair controllers. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
insp1re2600 Posted December 6, 2020 Author Share Posted December 6, 2020 looks like i bought another dud from corsair then.. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
c-attack Posted December 6, 2020 Share Posted December 6, 2020 I am not sure that is the takeaway. It's not "your XT" that does this, but it's a compatibility problem fan and controller. There are thousands of other fans including the ones that came with the cooler that do work. Since they do run from the Commander (as do my Chromax), you have a solution in place. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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