click to enlarge
Ahh, case modding - the latest fad to be inhaled by the commercialism sweeping across the hardware and overclocking scene. This is not necessarily a bad thing - certainly, the availability of devices like the DigiDoc5 is great - more so to more mortals like myself who would be incapable of making something like that from scratch. This is a similar idea, but much simpler execution.
I was surprised by the quality of this kit - I was expecting some backyard-soldering job wrapped up in a postpack, from someone hoping to make a few bucks off the current case-mod craze. Instead, the kit arrived in a tidy cardboard box, everything neatly separated into plastic baggies with full instructions. No dodgy soldering on a breadboard here, there's a custom PCB with no loose wires at all.
This latest peice of electronic trickery is called the RheoBus - because it's a FanBus that uses rheostats to control the fan speed. A rheostat, aka potentiometer or variable resistor is exactly that - a resistor that limits the current passing through it at a varying level - in this case, depending on the position of a rotating knob. Turn knob to the right, less resistance, more current, fan spins faster. Turn knob to the left, more resistance, less current, fan spins slower - and quieter. Where does the extra current go? I'm presuming it's bled off as heat, hence the hefty heatsinks attached to each channel of this unit. My electronics knowledge is famously bad though, which is why I play with kits like this and don't, for example, dodgily solder things onto breadboards.
The little shiny things on stalks are LED's - more on them later. Anyway, the heatsinks never seemed to get warm at all, whether running the fans at full power or maximum resistance. Maybe it's to do with the load through each channel - it's mentioned several times on the instruction sheet that loading up any channel - there are four - with more than 17W will cause Bad Things to happen - at the very least to your warranty. Given that the ubiquitous Y.S.Tech 60mm fan draws 2.16W and even the pet-inhaling, my-pc-blew-itself-off-the-desk Sunon KD1212PMBX-6A (120mm, 3150rpm, 120CFM) is only 7.6W, there seems to be plenty of headroom for putting lots of fans onto each channel and thereby controlling them all from the one knob. There's nothing to stop you running one fan per knob of course, but I thought it sensible to run the intake fan and blowhole off the same channel in my system.
Attaching fans is pretty simple - you cut the heads off the fan wiring, strip the insulation back a bit (I use my teeth, but traditionalists or dental prosthetists may use specialised tools) and insert the bare metal wire into the appropriate hole for the appropriate knob. Tighten the screw to hold the wire in place and you're done. If you wanted to be clever and still monitor the RPM of your fans, you could use a splitter cable as described here - I'd be careful to turn off any alarms related to fan RPM though, or your PC may freak out when you put the PC into quiet mode by turning all the knobs to the left.
The whole unit is powered by a molex connector, like a HDD power plug. You could run it directly off a power-supply connector, but there's a Y-splitter provided in the kit if you don't want to tie up a power lead with it.
 MacPower DigiDoc 5 |
 Speed Cheat affects benchmarks! |
 KingMax PC150 and PC133 v1.2 SDRAM |