Fan & IDE Installation Help

I

iced_maggot

New Member
Hey guys, im building my first high end gaming pc very soon and need some knowhow that ive never needed before because ive only made low end general pcs. My question is: is it possible to install multiple IDE devices on the same cable and if it is possible to install four case fans plus the cpu and northbridge fan on a Albatron PX925XE Pro mobo. That pirticular mobo has two 2 ATA133 Channels and 1 ATA100 Channels. Now does that mean that two of my devices will have to run on a reduced speed and if so, what would you reccomend, running the hard drives or the disk drives on reduced speed?
Also, the mobo has 1 cpu fan header and 2 system fan headers. That means there's enough for the cpu fan, the northbridge and one other fan. but i still need to install three others. is this possible to do? is there any way to directly plug in from the psu? I have a 500watt psu so, power shouldnt be a problem. Cheers for ure help guys,

btw my system is going to be a

Thermaltake Armor case, Albatron Px925XE Pro mobo, Leadtek 7600gt, 3.4 LGA775 64bit p4, 2x 120gb Seagate Barracuda + 1 80gb WD800 for backup, Thermaltake Big Typhoon CPU cooler, Zalman VF700-Cu VGA cooler
 
So long as you set the salve and master jumpers, you can have up to 2 IDE devices on each channel. How many IDE hard drives and opticals are looking to hook up?

As far as the fans are concerned, you can buy fans that have standard molex connectors, and you just plug them into a spare PSU molex cable. Because of this there's very little limit to how may case fans you can have, in truth the biggest limiting factor is the case itself.
 
thanks for the quick reply, i'm looking to install a dvdrom drive as master, and a dvdrw & a cd/cdrw as slaves Also three hard drives. Can i attach a hard drive & an optical on the same ide cable (channel)? Also the i'm not actually buying the fans they are coming with the case so im not too sure if they have a molex adaptor. Can you buy adaptors that covert 3pin into molex? Also if i use molex pins on the fans, wont i run out for powering drives and so on? can you buy molex double adaptors?
 
It is better not to mix slower and faster devices on one channel, but as it can't be avoided, make sure that you make the hard drive the master and the optical the slave. Definately don't do it the other way round. That way should work alright, I'm not sure whether you'll see a small amount of performance decrease, but it should work. I assume only one of your hard drives is IDE, the other two being SATA? Because you certainly won't get 6 devices on 2 IDE channels.

Built in case fans almost always (in my experience anyway) come with molex plugs as standard, most case manufacturers know that people have limited 3-pin sockets and an abundance of molex cables. Yes, if need be you can buy adaptors, something like this, but to be honest I highly doubt you'll need it.
 
Hmmm, no i was actually going to buy all the Hard drives as IDE but since that wont work, ill just buy the two big ones as SATA, the price difference is about 20 dollars so it doesnt really matter.

But just out of curiosity wouldnt itve worked, if i had put the CD/RW & the backup optical on the slower, IDE100 chanel and the two main drives & the two other optical drives on the faster IDE133 Chanel? im not too sure if you can mix DMA5 & DMA6 on the same mobo but yeah.

Also do SATA drives use the standard molex connectors or do you need a special connector? Finally, the SATA drives would come with the cabling required included wouldnt they? Never bought SATA before u see :P


Cheers again
 
As far as I know all ATA devices are backward and forward compatible, so in theory yes ATA133 devices would work in ATA100 slots, albeit at a reduced speed. But if you haven't bought the drives yet, then definately go with SATA, you have the slots and it'd be a lot less messy.

Sata drives tend (in my experience) to have two seperate connections for power, the standard molex and also a SATA-unique connection that you get on recent power supplies (this). So long as you don't plug them both in, either one will be fine.

Supplied cabling really depends on where you get the drives and whether it's OEM or not. You can always check with the vendor what comes supplied, if the cables don't come supplied they're really not that expensive to buy separately.

I don't know why the link didn't work, it was from a UK company so perhaps they've locked out their website to abroad. It should be fixed.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top