I just bought the coolermaster aerogate III, and I want to hook it up. Since it is made for use in a computer, I am wondering which way to wire it up, since the connection wire has 3 wires, black, red and yellow. I am guessing that the yellow one is 12v, and the red one 5v, as the computer power supplys are usually switching, but that is as far as I know.

Since I will be using an adaptor that provides 12v, should I hook up the main wire to the yellow one, and leave the red one alone?

Thank you all.

JF

on pc fans the yellow wire is the tach wire and not used in the projector

Yes, I agree that for fans, the yellow one is the tach wire, but I think this is different, it is not the same connector as the fan one, it the same one you use to provide power to harddrives, cdroms etc, .. in a computer..

It's just that I previously tried to hook up the aerogate II by myselft, thinking that the yellow did nothing. I am not sure if I srewed up or the aerogate was defective before hand, but nothing was working and I had to ship it back to get a new one.

That is why I don't want to mess with this one.

...would have put a picture of the thing but the girlfriend's gone with the camera... you know how it is

On a conventional Molex connector, yellow is +12v and red is +5v, so if its designed to plug straight onto a molex, then thats what it needs. Quite why a fan would need 2 seperate voltages supplied to it I do not know.

I don't know but that is how the aerogate is designed. Maybe it has something to do with the fact that it manages the speed of the fans, and therefore changes the voltage. But then again, why 5 v?

I will risk it again, and try to hook up the live wire to the yellow one of the aerogate, leaving the red one, and will report results here.

Why not connect yellow to 12 and red to 5 like it seems you should do?

Well, I am using a regular laptop adaptor, and therefore, I have two wires to use, ground and main, so I have to choose which one to select on the aerogate, either the yellow or the red. I am going to try with yellow and hope it will work.

If the fan (for whatever crazy reason) needs both 5v and 12v, It may well need both to work properly.

Good luck.

Sorry to re-hash an old thread, but I feel I can actually help here...
I'm no electricity expert, but I beleive the 5v wire needs to be hooked up so that the controller can adjust the fan speed.

<<<I haven't done what I'm about to talk about, it's possible I have the connections reversed or something, attempt at your own risk...>>>
A trick you can do with computer fans (and presumably any DC fan) is hook the 12v of the computer to the 12v of the fan, then hook the 5v AND the ground to the ground of the fan. Pretty much what you're doing here is making the fan run at 7v (12v - 5v). The lower voltage makes the fan run slower and therefor quieter.

I bet what this controller is doing is adjusting the ground:5v connection ratio to adjust the voltage of each fan (so "low" would be 7v to the fan and "high" would be 12v to the fan).