Fractal Designs R6/R7 Fan Hub Question

[Alan G]

I have as question about the Define R6/R7 fan hub. I'll be doing an update to my main Define R5 housed-workstation as it's over five years old now and I need to add more RAM which I cannot do as DDR3 sticks are really hard to find. I'll move up to an R6 as the cost is less than the R7; I also don't need USB-C on the front panel. I use this PC for photo editing and general work, no gaming. It sits on my desktop and needs to be totally quiet; the pre-installed Fractal fans are fine. I looked at the Fractal direction sheet and they show the three fans connecting to the hub and the CPU fan as well as there is a connector from the hub to the CPU fan control on the MoBo.

Is this the correct approach with this case? The R5 has a separate three position switch to control the two case fans via voltage control with the CPU cooler fan plugging into the MoBo. I have never needed to run those fans on anything other than the lowest setting. I'm just curious as this is a different approach with the newer cases.

TIA

[TVwazhere]

9 minutes ago, Alan G said:

Is this the correct approach with this case? The R5 has a separate three position switch to control the two case fans via voltage control with the CPU cooler fan plugging into the MoBo. I have never needed to run those fans on anything other than the lowest setting. I'm just curious as this is a different approach with the newer cases.

Neither is "correct" its more do you want your case fans to be controlled with your CPU cooler fan speed, or do you want them controlled separately as your current R5 setup is? Most people have a separate fan curve for them by plugging them into a chassis fan header and using the motherboard fan curves to adjust the speeds. Why the R6 shows to plug into the CPU header I'm not sure, but it's not needed to make the fans work properly.

[Guest]

What that little 3 step switch does is drive the fans with either 5V, 7V or 12V. The more volt, the faster they'll spin. 

With the newer fan hubs in the R6 and 7 you have a greater control over the fans instead of just 3 settings, but if you wish you can also just keep them on the lowest RPM which would correspond to the old 5V setting.

[Alan G]

thanks for the comments.  I'm aware of the voltage control in my R5 for the chassis fans.  However, Fractal do not install 4 pin fans that can be controlled by the MoBo, only three pin fans.  My assumption is that by plugging the fan hub will give me better control by letting the MoBo control those fans.  I'm just trying to some research ahead of time so the set up will go OK.  I didn't really find much in terms of YouTube or other case reviews that cover this.  they only mention the fan hub.  Fractal documentation is sparse other than a simple diagram.

[TVwazhere]

16 hours ago, Alan G said:

My assumption is that by plugging the fan hub will give me better control by letting the MoBo control those fans.  

That would be correct. The fan hub has both 4 pin and 3 pin headers for both types of fans, so you can plug in the versions you have to the fan hub and it will control them accordingly.