Arctic Cooling VGA fans on ATI cards
If you are thinking of installing an Arctic Cooling VGA Silencer fan on an ATI card, be aware that that the Arctic Cooling fan may fail and cause permanent failure of the output to the VGA fan. I received the e-mail (below) from Arctic Cooling after a Silencer 1 Revision 2 fan failed on first start; I should add that the Arctic Cooling fan short circuited, not the ATI capacitor.
"Dear Mr. xxxxxx
The cap exploded on the ATI card because ATI uses their fan speed controller in an improper way. They don't provide the motor with a stable 12V voltage, they have voltage peaks over 25V. So far we were using a 16V cap, that should offer a good reserve, but not for some ATI boards. The Nvidia boards don't use this controller. ...
It is important to inform the customers that the failure comes from an
overvoltage from the ATI board. The spec tells actually for all fans in the PC a max. voltage of 12V. ATI seems to have recognized the problem and switched from the LM63 to the LM64 controller on their latest boards. Since the ATI fan speed controller doesn't offer a clean and stable voltage, I recommend all users to take the power for the directly from the PSU. In order to get 12V you have to take black and yellow, to get 5V black and red. The easiest way, buy a Y-cable for the PSU, cut one plug, remove isolation of black and yellow and do the same on your VGA board. Then just twist the corresponding cables into each other and isolate it with a tape.
Since we will remove the cap, we will get a clicking noise back as soon as there is an LM63 controller used on the ATI board. The solution is here exactly the same, get the power from a thermistor or the PSU directly. Unfortunately as far as I know, there are no adapter cables...
Best Regards
xxxxxxxxxxxxxx
ARCTIC COOLING Switzerland AG
Huobstrasse 4
8808 Pfäffikon - Switzerland"