Fan Controller Recommendations

sweavesweave boston
edited November 2011 in Hardware
anyone have any recommendations?

i'm looking at the
http://www.nzxt.com/new/products/fan_control/sentry_mix
which seems pretty nice and simplistic if a bit analog
doesn't seem to be out on shelves yet though

also the
http://www.nzxt.com/new/products/fan_control/sentry_2
but the reviews for this seem to be all over the place

the first one has 50W per channel and the second one has 10W per channel?
does this make any real difference?

Comments

  • TushonTushon I'm scared, Coach Alexandria, VA Icrontian
    edited October 2011
    To answer your last question, I don't think it makes any difference, other than possibly overloading the fan (not sure if the electronics in there work that way, but I imagine you could overpower it and mess up life expectancy at least). The vast majority, if not all case fans, will be sub 10W.
  • primesuspectprimesuspect Beepin n' Boopin Detroit, MI Icrontian
    edited October 2011
    lol sorry, but your post says 50W per channel.

    Back in the 80s there was a local appliance store chain that did these hilarious commercials. Any Detroiter over 30 will have seen these and will lol at this.

    50 WATTS PER CHANNEL, BABYCAKES

    <object width="640" height="480"><param name="movie" value="http://www.youtube.com/v/kKQcZYTZVmI?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0"></param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true"></param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always"></param><embed src="http://www.youtube.com/v/kKQcZYTZVmI?version=3&hl=en_US&rel=0&quot; type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="640" height="480" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object>
  • djmephdjmeph Detroit Icrontian
    edited October 2011
    LOL I've never seen this before.
  • RyderRyder Kalamazoo, Mi Icrontian
    edited October 2011
    Classic!
  • shwaipshwaip bluffin' with my muffin Icrontian
    edited October 2011
    I have the second one. It's decent - I ended up unplugging all the temperature probes to cut down on the number of wires going everywhere.
  • sweavesweave boston
    edited October 2011
    cool
    anyone else use them that has a competitor they want to recommend?
  • RootWyrmRootWyrm Icrontian
    edited October 2011
    Depends on what fans you're going to use. You'll need to be specific there.
    Frankly, most folks don't need 50W. To give you some idea of how much fan 50W is, look up a little company called Delta Electronics. You're into the 200CFM 70dBA family of fans when you want that much power. They are monsters.

    If you're working with instead, say, Gentle Typhoons and S-Flex family, 10W is more than enough. I can't recommend the NZXT Sentry LXE enough for these applications. It is just a fantastic controller in automatic and manual. It has a nice ramping profile, it's good about saving settings, the works. It's just fantastic. I love it. Nobody can touch it.

    Of course, there's the channel issue. It's the one thing I don't like. The Sentry LXE is your best option up to 5 channels at up to 10W per channel (50W combined.) For higher power fans (15-30W) the Mesh is pretty nice (but obviously not automatic) but also limited to 5 fans. So you'll need two controllers if you have more than 5 fans to control or go to a $300 10 channel setup designed for watercooling.
  • edited October 2011
    I have a Lamptron Touch in a new build I just put together. Actually not a total new build, but rather moved a working system into a new case along with this fan controller. So far I like it, but I do have a little bit of problems getting it to work with my fingers. That isn't unusual with me though as I have trouble getting many touch oriented devices to respond reliably to my finger touch. I think it has something to do with 35 years or so of working on drilling rigs and handling drilling mud, which has rather messed up the skin on my hands. But it's a neat controller and Lamptron makes many other styles at different price points too. BTW, it was donated to me; a review unit that had already been reviewed then set aside for another Lamptron unit.
  • PetraPetra Palmdale, CA USA
    edited November 2011
    RootWyrm wrote:
    So you'll need two controllers if you have more than 5 fans to control or go to a $300 10 channel setup designed for watercooling.
    You say this as if one can't chain multiple fans to each controller channel... when, really, it's one of the major advantages to having a controller with a higher per-channel power rating.

    Example: when water cooling, you're usually not going to want to control a bunch of fans individually... you're going to control them in groups or zones. Typically, I'll end up with a case intake group, case exhaust group, and a radiator group (sometimes I'll break a push-pull setup into separate push and pull groups or have a dedicated group for each radiator). A setup like that could consist of anywhere between 4 and 24+ fans, depending on the build, and controlling all of them individually would just be silly. This is where higher power fan controllers become useful because you could, for example, very easily have a radiator group consisting of 3 to 8+ fans on the same channel.

    If you're using some fancy-pants controller which monitors the tach signal from the fans, then just make sure that you wire things up so that the controller only receives a tach signal from one of the fans in the group.
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