Hardware NZXT Sentry Mix 2 Fan Controller Review

Secnario 1. Normal usage. The components never heat up enough to bother my super system. I'm listening to Mogwai and Bon Iver and waiting for the kettle to pop. Fans to minimum.

Scenario 2. Game **** mega quest. I've got the original Matrix soundtrack on loop. I've got head phones on and I don't give a ****. Alll I'm listening for is headshot. THis is a gaming marathon bitch! Fans to the mother ****ing max!!!!

 

OK.. SchizoFrog, here's an example of when a physical, manual fan controller is a good idea.

My PC is set up with 6 fans, 1x140mm on the front, 2x140mm on the top, 2x 120mm on the side and 1x120mm on the back, all in a MidTower Chassis.

Now these aren't the quietest fans, but they move a lot of air. So for general use with games, rendering etc, I want them near enough to 100% (I don't max them as the 120mm fans hit a nasty resonance at 100%). And 95% of the time I have my PC on I'm doing one of these things.

However there are times where I will leave it on over night to download various things (Australian Internet is slow... 8Mbps slow) and being in the same room as I sleep in, I don't want it whining all night long. And having dual GPUs in a Mid Tower case with 6x HDDs means there isn't a lot of room for airflow, so internal temps don't drop a lot when "idling" so auto controlled fans wouldn't drop much if at all. So I manually turn the fans down to a quiet 20-25% RPM.

In this case, the fan control is for auditory comfort rather than cooling performance. My PC will hit internal air temps of 38*C over night on low fans, but whilst gaming the internal air temps are closer to 28*C with fans running high speed.

Hows that sound?

 

Again, fair enough - all the money Intel has, it'd hardly be fair to beat up on AMD over something like that. And that does sound awesome, tbh.

And SchizoFrog - I'm just saying they have a place in the market. That is, I've never exactly run across actual specs on the fan headers for any motherboard I've owned that I recall, so I'd be a bit wary of plugging a bunch of fans into a single header using splitters. Mostly because if I blew something out and hosed the board, it wouldn't be easily replaced.

Aside from that, you should see the ghetto-ass "fan controller" my wife's old case had - a pair of 80mm fans (intake and exhaust) wired to a two-way toggle switch (and about 4 feet of wire running hither and yon through the case) - flip the switch up, fans are at 12V; flip it down and they run at 7V. Had I had a potentiometer around the house at the time, I likely would have used that instead. Not that it's a 1:1 comparison, but it was easy to wire, and easy for her to get - no curves, no profiles, no unnecessary software running in the background. Flip up if hot, flip down if not / watching a movie / want it quiet.