CPU fan not spinning

I get corrected all the time, mostly by my wife, so I'm used to it. :) It's all good, no blood no foul.

Just to clarify. The diagram Sygnus posted is correct. And my fan most definately has a 4 pin header. My chassis fan has a 3 pin header.

Sygnus, what you say about the system being unable to perform as mine did without a cpu fan spinning makes sense, but believe me I'm perplexed myself! But the fan wasn't moving, and the BIOS said "CPU fan error". Even if I'm wrong and the CPU fan is secretly spinning that just leaves me with two problems - How do I get the BIOS to stop having me press F1 to acknowledge the fan error, and how do I shut that noisy chassis fan up? I don't want to have to press F1 everytime I wanna boot into Windows, and I'm sure the chassis fan didn't make so much noise on the previous motherboard.

Oh and I appreciate the input so far. I'll throw some rep up :)

Fumz said:

Either the fan is bad, or the cpu fan connector on the board is bad. You sure you've got it on right? I would triple check it. If that fails, there's another 3 pin connector just to the left of the northbridge on your board. If the wire from your fan can stretch that far, try that one out; this will let you know if it's the fan or the board.

^^basically what he said lol. Sure I'll post back what happens, but that won't be for another two weeks. So thanks for the help guys and see you then :)

If you're having that many problems with it, you might just want to go buy another fan. Or go to the local PC shop & explain the situation, or better yet, bring the PC in & have them hook up the fan. If it works, then the problem is solved. They probably have some old fans laying around and if they plug another one in & it doesn't work, they probably won't charge you for it.

The reason I say go to a PC shop is that it's good to be able to try something out with a known working part. If you end up buying something, and it's not the problem, you end up either owning the part or having to pay a restocking fee. it's happened to me a time or two.

If it doesn't work, it's something else. You might have a defective cable, one of the pins on the fan or the motherboard might be bad or broken. Or it could be the wrong cable. Or a loose wire....

Something like this is usually try this/try that until you narrow down the problem.

So I got around to testing the fan finally. I reinstalled and resecured the fan, and turned it on and it suddenly worked :S I guess I hadn't pressed the pin header on firmly enough or something. It works now anyway, but the chassis fan still makes a hell of a noise. I think i'm gonna replace the chassis anyway, the current one isn't so pretty. Thanks for the help guys!