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Review by: James "Agg" Rolfe It's a common enough occurrence in the Case Mods forum - someone decides they don't have quite enough airflow and starts cutting away.. a blowhole here, an intake there. Add in a cardcooler perhaps, and a bigger fan on the video chipset.. maybe a hdd cooler or two. They stand back, admiring their freshly-rebuilt creation, perhaps gathering friends and family for the first powerup.. they flick the switch and terror ensues as, like some "blowing the airlock" scene in a bad sci-fi movie, everything not tied down is inhaled into their PC in a deafening roar of wind noise. Oh alright, I'm being a bit overdramatic, but these things sure can get loud these days.. and don't try to tell me that this doesn't constitute a threat to poor Mr Fluffy. What to do? The next phase usually involves fitting switches to the fans so you can turn them on and off at will, or more cleverly, run them on 7v instead of 12v, which makes them slower and push less air, and in many cases almost totally silent. This has spawned a craze of "fan buses" or "bay buses", fancy gadgets that sit in a 5.25" bay, festooned with switches of all kinds, LED's, LCD displays, all kinds of crazy stuff. You can make 'em from scratch. You can buy them in kits. Or, you can buy them fully assembled. The latter appeals to me for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I don't have a lot of spare time. Perhaps more relevantly, what I know about electronics you could write in abnormally large letters on the back of an unusually small postage stamp. But I do have a PC festooned with fans of all shapes and sizes. What to do, what to do.. Enter the DigiDoc 5. This whizzo gadget can monitor 8 temperatures and control 8 fans automagically according to temperature - and, it has a funky LCD on the front.. and a little fan to keep the HDD you can mount inside it cool - and it monitors your voltages! Sounds perfect, no? Well.. it has good points and it has bad points. But first, a general intoduction to the unit.   click on images to enlarge Included in the package is the DigiDoc unit itself, 8 temperature sensors, a bundle of fan power cables (pre-attached), a little bag of mounting screws (both for attaching a hdd to the unit and mounting the unit in your case) and a few strips of clear super-thin orange sticky tape, for attaching thermal probes to things. The cardboard backplate of the package has a features list on one side and on the other, a "Quick Install" guide. There's a note on this sheet saying that for detailed instructions you should refer to the PDF manual. This is puzzling, as there is no media (cd's etc) included with the unit and nowhere does it list the URL for the manufacturer. In fact, the only place it even mentions who makes the unit is on the QA and serial number stickers on the bottom saying "MacPower". A wild guess of www.macpower.com.tw and some digging revealed a page about the unit and, indeed, a downloadable PDF manual. A 23-page full colour manual, no less. They've even got their own DigiDoc5 Forum but, judging by the number of zero-reply threads, I wonder if MacPower spend any time supporting people in there. The main unit sits in a 5.25" drive bay - if, like me, you're using a 3.5" HDD in a 5.25" mounting kit, you can replace the kit with this by mounting the drive in it. The inbuilt 40mm Sunon fan helps keep the drive cool. Next to the fan is the green PCB for connecting the temperature monitors (the bank of jumper connectors at right when viewed from the back) and the fan leads (pre-connected). The PCB contains the brains of the unit and controls the LCD panel on the front. The LCD screen is nice and bright, pleasant enough orange backlight, but hard to read if you're above or below it. Side-to-side seems to be fine, but if you have a fulltower sitting on your desk and the DigiDoc5 mounted in the top bay you won't be able to read it. I had no problems with my midi-tower and it in the bottom bay, very clear.   click on images to enlarge Below left is a closeup of the 7 fan connectors - only 7 because Fan1 is prewired to the 40mm fan inside the DigiDoc. You could unplug it, but there's no spare cord to attach another fan to the header. Below centre shows the buttons for controlling the unit - the centre oval button is the Force button (turns all fans on until you press it again), the recessed hole is for the reset button to set all configuration back to default. The unit has an EEPROM inside so it remembers your custom settings while your PC is powered off or it's unplugged. Below right shows the flip-down cover and removable dust filter for the 40mm fan.    click on images to enlarge Speaking of fans, the website and manual both make mention that the DigiDoc5 can "now" handle up to 12 Watts or 1000mA per fan. That means it should easily handle the most monstrous 12v 120mm fan. Of course, all the fan connectors support the 3rd pin for RPM monitoring. However if your fan has a molex (hdd-type) power connector you'll need to find some adapters because MacPower don't provide any. The in-bay unit is powered by a standard molex (hdd-type) connector which plugs into a floppy-type power connector on the PCB. I'd imagine you could just plug your power supply's spare floppy power lead into the PCB if you have one - I've not tried it though, so if it blows up I don't wanna know. :) It displays the 12v and 5v line value at all times and can alarm when they stray out of tolerance. You can adjust how wide those tolerances are. The included temperature probes are basically a thermistor on the end of a long lead - 2 of the flat kind and 6 of the lumpy kind, to use their technical names:  click to enlarge I dunno if you'd get the same number of each as I did, with yours, or if it's a random selection - the only reason I can think of for needing the flat ones over the lumpy ones is for sliding under your heatsink, up next to the CPU slug. As you're likely to have at most 2 CPU's, including 2 flat ones is sensible and that may well be what MacPower were thinking. Of course, if you do that, you should never put the thermister BETWEEN the slug and the heatsink, only next to the slug. If you're in Australia or New Zealand and want to purchase the DigiDoc5, AusPCMarket are taking pre-orders for AUD$145.20. They're imported by Elsa (who provided the review unit) but end-users should go to AusPCMarket. Other Recent Reviews:
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