Gadgetory

okay so today I'll be unboxing the arrow cool v12 XT this is a touch LCD fan controller so you can see right off the bat it is a dual bay controller and it sits in two five and a quarter inch base they have a finger here so and it's called a touch LCD fan controller so this is a touchscreen LCD display that you see on the front and you know what why don't we just go ahead and work our way around the box and see if we can find out some more information so other languages are on the sides but English being apparently the most important to air oh cool oh and look big even started the package open for me so I can just rip off the plastic very easily without a knife effect almost oh you know I was doing really well there ah yes no night success okay so let's have a look at the features on the back so you got a large LCD screen two by five and a quarter inch bays which I already covered innovative touch LCD technology racer style fan controller design so they've designed it to look kind of like a speedometer and then a tachometer which is kind of cool if you're into that monitors and control four sets of temperature and fan speeds individually the LCD backlight can be either on or off you can switch between Celsius and Fahrenheit I've actually seen this feature missing on fan controllers before and it drives me crazy because everyone sets it to Fahrenheit by default and in Canada we use Celsius overheating alarm temperature warning hard drive working display okay so you can plug this into your hard drive LED header on your motherboard lock function provided to prevent careless miss touch it's kind of neat okay so why don't we get this opened up and have a look inside the first thing we will find is the unit oh and then okay good there is some documentation I thought there was zero documentation inside now it's going to freak out because then I would have nothing to talk about except what I already just talked to them so why don't we have a look at the documentation first number one is a user's manual so this unfolds pretty good here I did again okay so here English the Fenton controller is operated by touch LCD screen okay we've got that much okay you can browse fans beat select a fan of your choice from fan 1 to fan 4 to view the fan speed so you just touch it on the fan speed and then browsing temperatures you can select a channel of your choice to view the temperature and the thermometer display so you can choose either CPU VGA hard drive or system and then you'll get a temperature reading right here a key lock and unlock so you can unlock or lock it setting a fan speed okay so you touch to unlock the LCD touch fan 1 to see the RPM display and then you touch the digits inside the pink square I don't see a pink square huh okay well you touched the digits inside the pink square the digits begin to blink and then you touch plus or minus to adjust the fan speed at 100 rpm intervals very cool ok around the other side and this is a Yuko case it shows you basically how to change every aspect of this displays and touch screen and fan controllers settings ok so here is how to replace heat sensors for how to install the heat sensors I guess so you split the cables and then run them to wherever you want them to go so you can see they've got the little temperature sensors here and then you unplug the failed thank you Oh replacing a fan cable there showing you how to replace failed cables that can't happen that often ok so why don't you have a look at the accessories that are included right off of that here and ok everything seems to be mostly pre attached to the unit but why don't we have a look at what's in this bag matters so the first thing we have are little adhesive strips ok the next thing we have are what appear to be some extension cables so we have two fan extension cables here ok and then we have two temperature sensors so these seem to be replacements yeah so they've included instructions and replacements just in case the fan cables or temperature sensors here fail well that's very helpful of them at any rate they're covering all of their bases here then we have eight installation screws that we can use to install this in two to five and a quarter inch base and then we have a look at this guy here so it uses steel construction on the side so you know I've seen too many that used like an aluminum sheet here that's not thick enough but you can see this is not going to flex and Bend because what can happen is while you're installing it you might need to pinch them a little bit tight to get it into the front of the case and then they don't go they don't go back into place and it's hard to screw them in from the side so they've thought of that which is very helpful and why don't we just uncoil all the cables that are plugged into the back of this guy mm well you can have a look at how long the cables are for one thing because that's another big complaint that I've had about fan controllers in the past is if the cables aren't long enough to reach something then it's not very helpful at all is it okay so oh this is kind of neat okay so while this fan controller doesn't use PWM technology it just uses straight DC to control the fans what they've done is they've made it so that the 3 pin cable goes out to a 4 pin compatible cable so you can either plug a 3 pin fan or a 4 pin fan into this in order to get the most out of your compatibility for different fans and I don't know what this does this is interesting so this is an RPM sensor that also includes another ground so you could potentially plug a fan into here and then you could take this out and plug it into an RPM sensor on your motherboard but you've already got an RPM sensor on the fan controller so it seems to be all about redundancy with this thing it's got alarms for if your fans fail you can plug it into your motherboard so your motherboard can set off an alarm if your fan fails this is all about system safety and temp sensors so these are oh you know what I never showed you how long these cables were today ok so the cables are about this long that is all ok and then for the temp sensors these are actually hot glued in ok but they should come off fairly easily if you really wanted to do that so you've got the 4 temp sensors and then you've got see this red stripe down at the other end that is the hard drive LED so not only can you plug this into the hard drive LED header on the motherboard then you can take your case harddrive led and plug it into this one so they'll both go off whenever you access your hard drive redundancy there you go so this thing is taking functions that you could have already done and doing them better but then you also still have the old functionality that's awesome because I hate it when you plug in like a front panel like a new front panel thing and then what it does is it just makes the stuff that came with your case dead like if you plug in like a mega five and a quarter inch so the full SD card cut me off in the middle of my rant about how duplicated functionality on a front panel thing that you add to your system might render something else useless like if you buy something that has an eSATA port on the front and then you have to unplug the eSATA port on your case in order to make that one work is like pretty stupid but this one make sure that you don't run into that problem so I'm actually in the time I've been off camera plugged in a couple of fans okay into the back of the unit so I plugged one in using their extension cable and I plugged one in directly so you can see the backlight from around the side and PCB and you can actually see the front display so yeah we're monitoring the RPM of fan number one right now it's at 1700 and then 2600 rpm and then 1200 rpm I'm not sure how completely accurate that is but honestly I don't think it really matters okay I think it's unlocked right now and I think I can adjust it I don't know I didn't read the instructions very carefully on how to adjust the fan speed but one thing I did notice is that if you unplug it oh there's an alarm there you go there's your alarm anyway thank you for checking out my unboxing today of the v12 xt fan controller from air cool air oh cool