need advice wiring all my fans and pump/res combo to motherboard using PWM

[srbraith]

Let me start out by saying that Im doing a build similiar to Jayz2cents Skunkworks. I know....WAY OVERKILL!!! Im very new to this and I apoligize if things dont make sense. Havnt decided on the majority of parts yet but know that I want to do custom water cooling like he did it. Going to have 2 custom water cooling loops one for the cpu and one for the dual 1080 video cards using the Caselabs sm8 case.

Going to have a total of 14 fans.

4 fans for the 560mm radiator cooling GPUs on bottom of case
2 fans for the 280mm radiator cooling GPUs on bottom of case

4 fans for 480mm radiator cooling CPU on top of case

3 air fans in front of case
1 air fan in back of case

I want to be able to control the fan speeds for the GPU rad fans separate from the CPU rad fans and separate from the air fans front and back. So 3 separate fan controls.

What is the best way to accomplish this so I can control the fan speeds to each of the 3 fan groups using BIOS or software program?

I was told you need to use the PWM 4-pin fan headers on the motherboard to control the speeds of the fans.

Jay uses 3 of these in his build to combine all the fans together

http://www.performance-pcs.com/modmytoys-4-pin-power-di...

So im guessing you atttach all the fans you want to one of these blocks. Than do you buy an adapter that will have Molex on one end that attaches to the 8 way block and a 4 pin female connection on the other end that connects to the 4-pin male fan header on the motherboard? The adapters that I see only have 3-pin which than I think I would lose fan speed control.

What headers would I need on my motherboard? Three 4-pin PWM headers? And if I add in 2 of these pump/resovoir combos: https://www.ekwb.com/shop/ek-xres-100-revo-d5-pwm-incl-... , will I need 2 more 4-pin headers for a grand total of 5 headers? The evga Z170 Classified motherboard as this: Fan Headers – 7 (2 PWM, 5 DC / PWM). Does that work?

Is there a better way to do this to accomplish what I want? Am I missing something?

thanks in advance for your feedback....im very new to this stuff

 

[BonzaiDuck]

So you've become comfortable with the idea that you don't need a 3rd party fan controller. That's good.

You don't need all the fan ports. My own Z170 (not in sig) is much more modest than your higher-end Classified, but the Sabertooth Z170 S (or Mark 1 for that matter) has as many fan ports. They're all dual-use ports, and the BIOS can be set to either control by voltage or PWM-mode.

You can buy ~$10 Swiftech 8-port splitters to run and control several devices off a single PWM port and power them from the PSU. So you want to make a list or plan for the fan-deployments of different kinds -- the radiators being the obvious and easily-resolved aspect.

If you have 3-pin fans, you could equally wire them in parallel so that one device can be monitored, although I suppose there are ready-made splitters which do the same identical thing. And no less for the PWM splitters -- you would only be able to monitor one fan or device, even though the remainder of the devices will be identically controlled from the same fan port.

The reason I suggest these things derives from a sense that you would rather draw less power for fans from the motherboard, that you don't prefer a fan-wire clutter. So it's nice to have 13 PWM and 3-Pin ports on a motherboard, but one could see good reason to limit usage to a smaller number of those ports.