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NZXT Sentry LXE Colour Touchscreen Aluminum Fan Controller Unboxing & First Look Linus Tech Tips

2010-08-18
today we're gonna be unboxing a new fan speed controller from NZXT this is the sentry LXE it's a high performance touchscreen fan controller supports up to 8 watts per channel I mean an 8 watt fan is a pretty beefy fan so this is gonna support most of the fans on the market without any difficulty it displays our PMS for 5 fans which stands to reason because it is a 5 fan control fan speed controller you can also get 5 temperature displays you can get a touch screen monitor which you can press to control everything anyway alright I think that's pretty much oh that's interesting it says 10 watts per channel on the back so I wonder which of those is correct maybe if someone someone knows which is correct they can they can tell us interesting so there's a desktop external temperature meter through a PCI card interface touch interface intuitive rpm control auto emmanuel mode operation hey it displays the date time and day of the week it has a brushed aluminum frame and a screen on/off switch it also features an alarm system which it has in common with most fan speed controllers because the whole point of a fan speed controller besides controlling the speed of your fans is to alert you if anything goes wrong and it loses control so the alarm will tell you if fans go below a certain rpm or worse yet if they stop altogether and in theory that'll alert you alarm you yeah it should alarm you but in theory that'll let you know that the fan has failed and you need to do something about it quick test and hurry before your stuff overheats and dies so here's the user manual which is really one panel no two panels ok well there this is the English one right here so it shows you you connect the little PCI card here you connect the three pin fan connectors to the board and the fans you want to control and detect you plug a little this is interesting people here well why don't we pull this out and have a closer look okay well hold on let's see what else we have here so here's the touch screen interface usage so they show you the places to touch in order to select fan channels hold this button to turn off the screen oh you can turn off the screen that's cool because if you're sleeping or whatever it's pretty handy touch the switch to go between auto and manual modes modify the time having a manual like God is really useful because I remember I was trying to use one of the touchscreen fan controllers a while back it wasn't an NZXT one I don't remember which one it was exactly but it was just a nightmare to try and figure out how to do anything on it and I mean I'm not exactly you know this isn't my first computer component I I can usually figure things out fairly easily but this one was just ridiculous I couldn't figure out how to do anything with it every time I tried to adjust anything I ended up like triggering the alarm or something stupid like that it was not a very good experience but hopefully this one would be better so you got a couple of different mounting options for this guy I think maybe you don't I'll open it up and find out oh no you don't know this is interesting okay well what I was expecting was for this to be a dual five and a quarter inch Bay fans beach controller but what it actually is and I guess I should have known this somehow yeah you can see the stand right there on the box I mean it should be pretty obvious but this actually sits on your dentist's can it looks quite nice you've got the brushed aluminum finish that they were talking about before you've got kind of a chromed accent around the screen itself and then you've got the touch screen right here and this is I mean this is thick too this is just gorgeous metal because what you typically see unlike a cheap component that's gonna sort of sit on your desk like this is you'd see aluminum maybe half the thickness of this usually steel never mind aluminum but it would be just like thin thin stuff wouldn't look very nice but this is actually got like a it's got a plastic back on it but I don't think that really matters because they've just got a gorgeous piece of aluminum on the front here these bottom pieces I'm not sure if they're stickers or not no it looks like they're just rubber so they're non-slip rubber on the bottom here to make sure that it doesn't slip okay if you were to put it down on say for example a park bench you wouldn't have to worry about it moving around too much see I can put a little bit of force on it and it won't move too badly all right so let's have a look at the accessories that are included with the LXE first of all we have this wow that's a long cable look at this I think it's longer than I am Paul which isn't really saying much but I guess it's gonna be yeah Wow it's gotta be like six and a half feet tall okay interesting I guess we'll find out what that does it evolved it and then what other cables do we have so we have our PCI control card that's pretty cool all right so here's all of our temperature sensors five temperature sensors coming out of these temp 1 temp 2/10 3/10 4 and temp 5 headers here and then here we have what's this this is probably power I guess let's find out we'll take this twist tie off and this thing actually looks pretty cool I haven't seen something like this before it's quite unique fan speed controllers are one of those things that it's really hard to find a good one like I actually spent Wow after International shipping I had to buy it from like Germany or something ridiculous like that but I actually spent about a hundred and fifty dollars on my fan speed controller just to get something that worked the way I wanted it to so anyway here we have the five fans that we can control and then there are all of the cables for them so you can run these to any part of your case quite easily you can see these aren't quite as long as that other cable we were looking at but they are pretty long assuming you mount it somewhere near the top of your PCI slots and then the last one here is yeah that's power so you've got a 4-pin molex power connector here and then there's a battery spot and they include a battery for you so I'm guessing you plugged that battery in and it keeps all of your settings stored when the system is powered off and it does not have any power profiles and speeds and your time and all that it's going to be stored without having to worry about it we have a couple of temperature sensor I'm sure why we have additional ones because there aren't anymore ports but yeah it looks like we have two more attempts sensors how interesting okay I'm not quite certain that I can figure out why they're here but they're here so you have two more attempts sensors maybe it's just if you want to run them somewhere else in your case because the other ones are all kind of grouped together maybe if you don't want to use two of them okay and I figured out what this cables for so this cable goes from the back of the PC I mounted card here so it keeps would only go within one way so you can see it goes in that way so goes from there to wherever you want so it goes out of the back of your computer assuming your computer is positioned somewhere sort of around here and then it plugs into the back of the touchscreen display and then you put that wherever you want that's actually really classy looking look at that anyway I like it thank you for checking out my video blog on the NZXT sentry LX e touch screen fan controller
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