Wiring a 4-pin fan direct to 12v DC

Hi folks,

If I want to wire my 4-pin Coolink SWiF2-120P PWM fan (yellow, black, green & blue wires) direct to a 12v DC source, do I connect the yellow lead to the 12v positive, the black to ground and ignore the blue and green signal leads?

I have searched all over and found some confusing (at least for me) information.

Thanks,
Jim

I'm not sure what the colors mean on your fan or what the pinout is. Usually you've got say a Yellow, Red, and Black. I normally would wire the red and black to positive and neg respectively and ignore the yellow altogether.

If you end up wiring more than one fan though, make sure you wire them in Parallel not Series.

Example:
[img]https://www.icmag.com/gallery/data/500/31826SeriesVsParrallelHookup.jpg[/img]

Do you have the fan-to-molex adapter for that fan or did it come with one? If so, then it's easy to figure out which ones are supposed to be on the 12v and which ones can safely be ignored. Look at this diagram:

Then I'd just wire up pins 1 and 2 and ignore the 3 and 4 pins

now that's a good point, although I don't think it's necessary. I'm not sure what "sense" means in the 4-pin layouts, usually with 3 pin, the "control" is the fan speed. The motherboard reads out the temp and tells the pin to go up in RPM or down in RPM depending on the need for heat dispersion.

I wired up some regular 3-pins in a cabinet one time for an HTPC and they had the molex connector adapter. I liked going through the molex adapter because I could change out the fans if they died/quit working without having to desolder anything or clip and resolder.

Thanks again. It's funny that I'm having such a hard time finding the answer to this question. Answers given on other internet sites to similar questions by other posters were conflicted.

I would use the molex connector, but these fans are going into a telescope that doesn't use those connectors. Soldering is just part of the deal.

While trying to figure this out for myself, I touched the yellow wire to the red terminal on my 12v battery and the black wire to the black. What I got was a momentary spin-up of the fan that then stopped. I don't know if the weak connection formed by just touching the wires lightly to the terminals causes the temporary spin of the fan, or whether the green or blue wires need some kind of DC voltage for the fan to work.

While I was experimenting with touching different wires to the red terminal on the battery I fried a $15 fan. I ordered another, but I would like to avoid more costly experimentation.

Ah, thanks for the picture of the adaptor. That, indeed, would make future changeouts easier. Definitely a consideration assuming my fans will work as we expect them to with just the two leads connected.

Thanks again for all your help!