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