Dreamcast Replacement Fan

It shouldn't matter unless it's actually dragging down the power line - if you have one of the single-sided boards with the ports on it, it's also worth checking for dry joints on the fan connector since I've seen quite a few of them cracked, and that can cause shutdowns.

The VA0 DC didn't need the fan monitor because it had temperature monitoring on the heatpipe assembly, and would shut down if the unit started to overheat. Since the VA1 and later units don't have this, they put in some logic to shutdown the machine if the fan wasn't working.

 

I plugged in the original fan, and it worked perfectly. It is definitely something funny going on with the yellow wire. And I have mentioned that this is the three wire Dreamcast.

 

OK, then it's presumably just that it doesn't like the tacho signal - on some 12V fans, it's open collector so it might need a pull-up resistor to 5V.

Yeah, I knew you had the 3-wire fan, but you did ask about the 2-wire VA0 type earlier. I was just explaining that you could unplug the fan on those and they would run happily until/unless they got too hot.

 

The fan IS 5V, which I why in the beginning of the thread I was asking about it.