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December 7th, 2018 06:00

Area-51 R5, fan upgrade problems

Having seen the rather nice thread on upgrading the stock fans to quieter ones I've done the same on my rig.

I had 2x ml120 (not pro or rgb) on the radiator in push pull, 2x ml120 pro rgb on a splitter on top fan and 1 ml120 pro rgb on the pci fan slot.

The problem with this is the bios (version .17) doesn't detect the fans at all, although they are running. On boot it goes to the supportassist hardware test and hangs.

I replaced one of the fans on the radiator with the original fan on the splitter cable with all 4 pins so it would send the tach signal and the bios detected it fine, with the other fan pushing just fine.

Next when it boots it complains about not having any top fan (Hangs at support assist). I've not plugged up the rgb side of things on the front fans yet but I don't see why that would have any effect on the pwm side of things.

Has anyone come across anything similar or got ideas for a fix?

Cheers,

Dom

p.s. The irony of it all is that it turns out the unbearably loud noise was the 2 u.2 fans which were howling away stuck at 40% in AWCC. I unplugged those and it is nice and quiet so the upgrade is a bit of a vanity project, but I'd like to get it working.

8 Wizard

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47K Posts

December 7th, 2018 10:00

 

 

Dell fans use different wiring.  You could cut off the Dell fan wiring cable and re wire to standard.  I think dell knows the cat is out of the bag so they make all wires black now.

https://topics-cdn.dell.com/pdf/alienware-area51-r4_service-manual_en-us.pdf

BLUE WIRE IS PWM
BLACK WIRE IS GROUND
WHITE/YELLOW WIRE IS TACH
RED WIRE IS +12V

Left is Dell Fan  Right is Standard Fan Socket.

With 3 Wire Fans they also swap wires.

https://www.amazon.com/AE-Market-Dedicated-Adapter-Conversion/dp/B07G54XY5R/

 FAN WIRINGFAN WIRING

 

DELL FAN ConversionDELL FAN Conversion

 

2 Posts

December 8th, 2018 06:00

Thanks for the suggestion. The fans I took out seem to have normal 4pin pwm connectors with black red yellow blue configuration. Any other ideas?

52 Posts

March 10th, 2019 15:00

The Corsair ML 120 mm non rgb fans caused error code on my Area 51 R2. I went back to the oem fans and the problem went away.

402 Posts

March 11th, 2019 13:00

The standard ML120 fans also caused ePSA boot errors on my Aurora R7.  Swapping them over to the ML120 Pro fans removed the issue.  It may be the same in your case.

9 Posts

May 21st, 2019 09:00

may be the low RPM cause the issue.the ml 120 pro has 2000 rpm, but the NF-12F only 1500 max.

I saw someone use the normal 1700 rpm gray NF-12 also comes without the error..

 

9 Posts

May 21st, 2019 09:00

same for NF-12F, I notice the error too,, but it works, don't worry about that. 

do you still hear some noise? like the liquid pump fan, the power supply fan?  and the toshiba HHD 

9 Posts

June 7th, 2019 11:00

Alienware Area-51 r5 CPU radiator fan successfully mod Noctua NF-F12 iPPC 3000 PWM, running without ePSA issue.
Tested: the Corsair ML120 Pro, Noctua NF-F12, NF-A12x25, NF-S12A fail on the ePSA.
The top fan and pci fan mod is undergoing
Tested: the Corsair ML120 Pro, Noctua NF-F12, NF-A12x25, NF-S12A fail on the ePSA.
The ePSA error is caused by the fan not reach the target PRM. The target PRM for CPU fan is 2600+, for pci and top fans are 2777 PRM.

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