Here at the Evatech offices we have accumulated a large box of OEM case fans and before we tried to sell them or even give them away, we wanted to make sure they were all working first.
In order to test them all, we could have just plugged them all in one by one, but it’s Friday afternoon and where’s the fun in that? We decided answer the question that no-one was asking, how many fans can a cheap old PSU power at once? So we dragged out a 230w sfx PSU we had we had lying around the office and start daisy chaining every fan together until they simply wouldn’t start to spin.
10 Intel CPU fans, 16 120mm fans, 10 140mm fans and 6 200mm fans later we had our answer. 42.
5 of them did have LEDs, so if we stuck to only non-LED fans we might have been able to squeeze in one more, but once we got to 43, the last fan just wouldn’t start to spin.
We feel the need to emphasize the absence of any cable management at all in these photos in no way reflects the care and time we put in to each and every custom PC we build for our customers, but for this Friday afternoon experiment it will have to do.
As for the PSU that made this all happen, it was this little rust bucket salvaged from a water damaged customers PC, totally unfit for resale, but capable of powering at least 42 fans from a single Molex connector.
We don’t suggest doing this at home, but if your looking for some cheap, tested, fully operational case fans, we will be clearing out 100’s of them early next week so stay tuned.