Mystery Object

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I’ve been sorting out the Closet of Various Things tonight, getting rid of duplicate cables and moving stuff I’m not using to colder storage.

But I found this thing.

Like, WTF?

8 thoughts on “Mystery Object”

  1. Looks like a fuse to me. Though why anyone would put a fuse on a connector like that is a bit of a mystery. The heat shrink would be to stop an exploding fuse making too much of a mess. If you measure its resistance, I bet it’ll look like a short circuit.

  2. Hm… I’ve got a multimeter here, but I’m not quite sure what it’s telling me.
    I think it’s saying that there’s a 90 ohm resistance over the… thing…

  3. Ah, how exciting. Seems that my first comment got posted despite me not managing to log in the first time around.

    Anyhoo, looks like I was wrong. Very strangely packaged power resistor?? I suspect the only way to solve the mystery is to take off the heatshrink and search for whatever markings you find. Or not bother. Either way 🙂

  4. It occurs to me that since it has a Molex connectors, and fans have Molex connectors — perhaps it’s a resistor designed to trick a motherboard into believing that a fan is attached? I’ve got some fanless machines…
    And perhaps it also generates a pulse, so that the motherboard things that the fan is going (say) 1000 RPM? Which might explain it being so big.
    But I have no way to test the latter theory, I mean hypothesis, I mean guesswork.

  5. Ah, that would explain the whopping great connector on a resistor. If it measures 90 ohm then (assuming a 12V rail) it would be sinking 1.6W, which seems like quite a lot. But then I searched for case fan power draws and (except for the high end ones), they seem to come in at about 1.8W. Bingo?

  6. About the pulse idea: if this thing is really dissipating 1.6W, it’s probably just a big fat resistor. I don’t really understand why it’s covered in heatshrink though. Vague googling suggests that cases regulate cheap case fans by just increasing or decreasing the voltage on the power rail, so I would think that a resistor would be enough to fool a motherboard into believing it had a cheap fan connected.

  7. trick motherboard into thinking it has a cpu fan attached because with watercooling you would not attach one

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