Asus Fan Extension Card
on Odin
Motivation
The ASUS ROG ZENITH EXTREME motherboard came with a Fan Extension Card.
Unboxing
When looking at the manual, it’s useful to know that the OD Bay means the Optical Drive Bay means Any 5.25” Bay… but after installing it, I might move it to a 3.5” adapter.
Install
Currently, I have it mounted to a drive bracket.
Once the new 3.5” bay comes in, I’ll move it over to that. The reason being that the faceplate and this bracket are trying to utilize the same screws in the same holes… and that’s causing them to not line up correctly.
You can see that every other small wire is for the thermistores. The larger ones are for the fan controllers. It supports 3, but I am currently only controlling the top two bays of push-pull fans on my radiators.
The input can be either 4-pin or 5-pin. I’m using the 5-pin to the motherboard.
Detour
While writing this up, I realized that I forgot to plug in the Molex which probably explains why my thermistors are not registering :)
I shut everything down and connected one of the existing Molex cables (apparently I used them all in this build).
On booting up I went into the BIOS and noticed a few changes.
First, EXT_Sensor1/2/3 Temperature shows up now.
Second, Extension Fan 2/3 Speed showed up (not 1/2?).
Also COV Fan showed active speed, which it hadn’t before. Looking online, they are saying that is the VRM fan.
Looking closer at the Bracket photo above, we can clearly see that the pins closest to the Molex are: EXT TS3, EXT FAN3, EXT TS2, EXT FAN2, EXT TS1, EXT FAN1; then around the corner FAN IN and EXT FAN IN. Clearly I should have plugged in #1 instead of #3 but… eh…
Thermistors
So I wasn’t really sure where to install them. The motherboard is already monitoring the CPU, the VRM, etc. I already have the water being monitored. So I decided to try some random spots.
Inverter (EXT_TS3?)
Does the inverter get hot? I have no idea. Why don’t we find out?
Power Supply (EXT_TS2?)
How about the power supply? Does it get hot?
Case (EXT_TS1?)
How hot is the incoming air? I am doing push/pull with the air coming into the case to discourage the cats sitting on, and therefore blocking, all my airflow. Let’s see how warm the air is getting.
