Fan Controller Recommendations
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?
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?
0
Comments
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" type="application/x-shockwave-flash" width="640" height="480" allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true"></embed></object>
anyone else use them that has a competitor they want to recommend?
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.
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.