
When building my AMD Hackintosh, I decided to prepare for a future upgrade of my CPU. I based my current build on an AMD Ryzen 3900X, but I plan to update it to a Ryzen 3950X. So I decided to install a CPU water cooling system.
NZXT Kraken X62 CPU Water Cooler
After installing the Kraken X62 CPU water cooler, I realized that, for it to work as it should, the cooler controller needs to run the Windows software after every cold start. Otherwise, it goes into a default mode, with the pump running at max speed, but the fans running on idle.
Why they decided to go that route is beyond me. Why they don’t save the last settings inside the controller chip for the cooler, so it survives a cold reboot is plain stupid. In my case, using the PC as a Hackintosh with Mac OS, I couldn’t run my machine doing heavy tasks because the fans cooling the radiator wouldn’t spin up, with the risk of overheating the CPU. The same problem exists on Linux as well.
So I had to find a better way.
Fan Hub/Controller
There are fan hubs and controllers available, where you take one of the PWM outputs from the motherboard, and connect it to the controller who uses the BIOS setting for the specific fan to control several fans. But that means more money spent. Thankfully there is a better way.
I got a fan cable splitter when I upgraded the 120mm case fan to a more massive 140mm Noctua fan. The splitter shares the PWM signal, and connects the fans in parallel, making them spin at the same speed. My main concern was if my motherboard, in my case an Aorus X570 Aorus Elite, could deliver enough power to drive two 120mm fans for the watercooler from one connector. I used the optional CPU fan/cooler header available to connect my splitter, and it works great. All I had to do was to go into BIOS and adjust the Alt.CPU fan settings to keep the water in the system at a reasonable temperature. So now, I have a great cooling system on both the Mac OS and Windows side.
Happy days!
Jay says
You may also want to check out…
liquidctl – liquid cooler control
Cross-platform tool and drivers for liquid coolers and other devices
https://github.com/jonasmalacofilho/liquidctl
a nice little tool for driving that X62 from within OSX
Roman says
Thanks, Going to try it cause I’m having heating problems while using media encoder.