Saturday, August 3, 2013

Quick Tech Tip #3: how to replace case fan connectors.

In this Quick Tech Tip I will show you how to replace a case fan connector. Its a fairly simple thing to do and useful if the case fan you have has either a broken connector or if you just don't like the colour. you will only need one tool for this and as long as it is able to fit in the slots on the connector it should do fine, I used a metal nail file for this but again as long as it's hard and thin enough to fit in it should work.

Before we start it's a good idea to make a note of the order that the wires go into the connector as you don't want to put them in the wrong way round do you? If your looking at the side of the connector with the slots in and with the wires coming from the bottom then the colours go from left to right:

  | |        | |        | |            | |

black - red - yellow - orange.

Note if you have a 3 pin fan connector you won't have the orange wire, Thats for 4 pin fan connectors.

In this example I'm replace the white connector of a  3 pin fan extension cable with a black Phobya 3 pin connector.

The extension cable before.
So first up you need to hold the wire you are going to take out first, Then take your tool (what ever you decided on) and push it down into the slot at the bottom if the wires are coming from the bottom. Gently pull the wire while doing this and it should come out fairly easily. Don't pull to hard or you might break the pin. Once you have the first one out do the same for the other and you should have something like this:

Connector removed.
Now it's just a simple matter of getting you replacement connector and pushing the pins one by one into the connector. remember to get the wires in the right order. You will here a faint click once there all the way in. Once you have all of them in it should look something like this:

New connector put on.
And your all done. That wasn't that hard now was it? This should work for pretty much all fan connectors however some fans have different coloured wires so make sure you make a note of which order they go in.

And thats the end of this Quick Tech Tip, Thanks for reading and I hope you've learnt something.