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?
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?
A slightly bizarre form factor for a plug in fuse? Have you tried measuring its resistance? I bet it’ll look like a short circuit.
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.
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…
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 🙂
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.
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?
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.
trick motherboard into thinking it has a cpu fan attached because with watercooling you would not attach one