Gadgetory

hey everyone this is Steve from gamers Nexus dotnet and today we're looking at NZXT century 3 fan controller and temperature readers so the century 3 is a follow-up to unsurprisingly the century 2 both of which are five and a quarter external drive bay accessories so they install into external drive bays you would not be able to use this on the h4 40 case for that reason but it will fit on basically any other case on the market the centry 3 is focused on giving a readout of your fan speed it can show five channels with fans and it can also link fans to one another for controlling them in terms of the speed finally it's got a temperature reader just one installed by default though there are options to install more and you can hook that temperature reader up to different parts of your case if you want the fan to be controlled by temperature and thresholds rather than manually by you just a use case example here we've got five fan channels on the centry three which means we can hook up five different fans or we can daisy chain fans two single channels so to give you an example let's say we have a case that's got a two hundred millimeter fan a 120 millimeter fan and two 140 millimeter fans so the problem here is if we're using stock fans just for sake of example the 120 and 140 millimeter fans are going to be significantly louder than the 200 plus millimeter fans and that's just a matter of size and speed of rotation so let's say that we want to keep the 200 millimeter fan at max speed because it's the quietest anyway so who cares but drop the speed of the 120 140 s we can actually hook all of those fans up to different channels and then we can even link the two 140 millimeter fans together in a single channel so when we drop the speed of them it will impact both fans simultaneously and decrease the RPM which decreases the noise levels in the case hopefully to match your slower quieter fans and this all of this so far is handled to touch input so you can actually link two channels together let's say you have front fans and rear fans on your case so you can link the front and rear channels together and then when you adjust the the dial there the dial is actually touch input when you adjust that to 100% or 40% or anything in between it'll change all fans in the front and rear configuration so that's kind of an example of how this device works it displays temperatures in Celsius and Fahrenheit unfortunately this is done using a temperature probe the problem with temperature probes is they can only read external temperatures generally of things like the heat sink you can't actually read anything useful like t-junction on the cpu obviously because that is handled at a semiconductor level on the die and you can't even read T case because it would need to be touching the inside of the integrated heat spreader to read T case so really what you're getting is a much cooler temperature than what is actually going on under the hood so to speak and that's because we're reading something after it's already been pushed through the IHS or even into the CPU cooler since the Sentry 3 has launched NZXT has announced and put out their cam software which is a temperature monitor control to the software level it shows T Junction it shows your GPU temperatures it shows your system specs it's pretty cool it even integrates with the new grid plus that I wrote about so if NZXT can figure out a way to link their future sentry perhaps the Sentry for 2 cam and use the T Junction CPU temperatures which is the actual temperature of the die not the temperature of the heat spreader which is kind of useless if they can integrate those and make it so that the Sentry acts on the cams readings I think they would have a seriously good product that I would actually want on a functional level not just an aesthetic level for my system that said the Sentry 3 is still very good it's it works pretty well the touchscreen is durable it responds to input very well it is a bit picky on the viewing angles the colors look good the control panel itself functions well and looks good it looks very sci-fi and works well on cases in that regard if you're looking for a cool way to soup your system after you've already built it this is something I would highly recommend unlike the Sentry 2 this one has very few fan cables and they're all modular so you can unplug any cables or channel cables that you're not using and that just means less clutter in your case so good news all around that's what we think about the Sentry 3 I worked with Michael Mann on this he wrote the full review hit that link in the description below if you'd like to review and some photos and I will see you all next time peace