Rasberry Pi4 fan at 3.3V instaead of 5V

    Hi, I run LibreELEC on a Rasberry Pi4. I use the official fan*, powered from 5V as shown in the attached scheme, and configured in /flash/config.txt to start when 60 °C are exceeded**, which does not happen too often. When it does, it only runs for a minute or so, enough to bring temperature below 50 °C. Therefore, I think 3.3V should be enough for the typical LibreELEC / Kodi use, but as I am not an expert, I'd like to confirm first if this reasoning is correct and if it is safe to do so. I think it should be much more silent (at 5V it sounds like an angry swarm of mosquitoes ;)) and less stressing for the fan.

    And in case any hardware expert reads this, I suppose I only need to move the red cable from Pin 4 to Pin 1, right? As you can see in the second attached image, the black and the red cable end in a double connector, which only allows plugging them onto two adjacent pins, like GND and 5V. So the easiest way is to use two male–female jumper wires?

    * https://www.raspberrypi.com/products/raspberry-pi-4-case-fan/

    ** dtoverlay=gpio-fan,temp=60000

  • Go to Best Answer

    Yes, movig the red cable to pin 1 (3,3V) should work, i have several PI4/5 with other 5V fans that run on 3,3V, they run all the time (dead quiet) and keeps temp below 40C.

    • Best Answer

    Not official Raspberry fan, but. Screenshot from sales page.

    At 5 volt it was the noisiest thing in the room. At 3.3v fan was still spinning and less noisy.

    Edited once, last by tokul (January 19, 2026 at 5:02 PM).

    That should work. I can't see how the extra load from the fan would be too much for the 3V3 regulator.

    Quote from tokul

    Not official Raspberry fan, but. Screenshot from sales page.

    That is a different fan than in OPs post. Their fan has three wires, the one pictured here only has two.

    Thank you all. Works fine. In deed, now you only here it if everything is quiet, and it still cools enough: I made the Raspberry work to get it triggered at 60 °C, and it runs a couple of minutes, bringing temperature down to 50 °C. Best regards.