Wednesday, May 25th 2022
Alphacool Announces the ES Guardian Powerfan Hub
Server and industrial fans have a very high power consumption due to their enormous performance. For that reason, they can usually only be connected directly to the power supply unit, since the existing connections on the standard mainboards cannot provide the necessary power. The problem is that the function of the fans cannot be checked, monitored or controlled via the motherboard. For this, Alphacool offers a smart and efficient solution to this problem with the ES Guardian 4-Port Powerfan Hub.
The ES Guardian 4-Port Powerfan Hub is placed at the desired position in the server case, connected to the server's power supply and connected to the mainboard via PWM cable. 4 industrial fans can be supplied with sufficient power and monitored and controlled via the BIOS. If a fan is defective, an error message can be issued by the mainboard and the problem can be quickly rectified. The Guardian Powerfan Hub also has 2 CAN bus connectors, which allow additional functions when using a CAN bus controller and the associated software.
MSRP: EUR 49.99, including taxes.
The ES Guardian 4-Port Powerfan Hub is placed at the desired position in the server case, connected to the server's power supply and connected to the mainboard via PWM cable. 4 industrial fans can be supplied with sufficient power and monitored and controlled via the BIOS. If a fan is defective, an error message can be issued by the mainboard and the problem can be quickly rectified. The Guardian Powerfan Hub also has 2 CAN bus connectors, which allow additional functions when using a CAN bus controller and the associated software.
12 Comments on Alphacool Announces the ES Guardian Powerfan Hub
Fans that require that much power really are the realm of rackmount servers and would make so much noise in a domestic environment that you'd need them to be at least a couple of rooms away with good door seals for them to not be obviously audible.
Rack server motherboards are almost always propriatary to the chassis, or at least the chassis will have a vendor-specific board with the rignt number and position of headers for each fan capable of high currents and individual fan monitoring.
If you're building your own server in a 3U case or something with a generic ATX consumer board then I guess this is a niche that could apply but how many people do that these days? The only reason I can imagine is almost dead (rackmount GPU farm for mining) and there's no point cheaping-out on the chassis and trying to jury-rig everything into a consumer ATX board when 6 or 7 GPUs worth rackmounting cost $10000+. If that's Alphacool's target market their timing is terrible!
They are weird or amateurs...
The bigger thing of interest to me though is if it can actually PWM control such fans, since industrial/enterprise-grade fans use a different PWM signal band than regular consumer fans (the Servo has a PWM frequency range of 500 Hz～5000 Hz).
A regular PWM controller like the Noctua NA-FC1 cannot work with them (I've tried). Sanyo Denki offers a very pricy PWM controller clearly marketed for the industrial side, while there used to be a few hybrid PWM controller-hubs that converted a PWM signal to voltage control (Phanteks' old model -01 4-fan hub was capable of PWM controlling non-PWM fans through voltage control). Lamptron, which used voltage control for many of their older controllers, originally planned for a more powerful version to their legacy CF525 5.25 Bay Fan Controller (5A per channel), as well as their legacy CP436 4-Channel PCI Slot Fan Controller (3A per channel), but that fell apart during the downturn where many tech companies died for awhile in the late 00s-early 10s.
The mounting is adapted to our server housings, as well as the PWM control to our server fans which are definitely controlled by PWM and not by DC. And no, the 16a is not a "burts" limit, but permanent.
If a SATA cable is used for 12V power like in this instance, it's limited to 1.5A per pin in the connector and there are three 12V pins in the connector, so 54W total.
The Molex power seen here can in theory handle 14A (so 168W) but I wouldn't want to put that to the test. Common sense says to assume the worst (22AWG wiring) and call it 84W max.