Installation
I was curious how they'd solve the problem of case drive-bay covers
- as everyone knows, there is no standard for these things and
they are all slightly more or less wider/taller/deeper than each
other and use different ways of hooking onto the case. The answer
is, they don't - or rather, they provide a simple work-around.
They give you a template and get you to drill your own faceplate,
which is sensible enough:
Then you rip the template off, which gives you a nicely holed faceplate.. a bit of fiddling with LED's etc and you get this:
Which, with a bit more fiddling, can be put into your PC and looks like this:
The first bit of fiddling involves bending the LED leads and fitting them into their little black housing cups which you have inserted into the holes in the faceplate. Your third arm will come in handy during this process. I found I had to widen a couple of the LED holes (maybe my drill-bit wasn't quite wide enough) and one of the rheostats was slightly mis-mounted on the PCB (one leg longer than the other) so I had to widen that hole up in one direction too. It's no biggie, and the washer/nut covers the rough hole anyway.
The fiddling in the latter stage mostly centres around the wiring to the fans. Once the unit is inside the drive bay, you can't get to the screws that hold the wires in (without removing anything from the drive bays above the RheoBus and ripping the top of your case off). You need to leave a little slack on your fan cables, so you can run the cabling through the drive bay, out the front of your machine, screw it into the RheoBus then stuff it all back into the drive bay. This meant, in my case, having the fans dangling loosely inside the machine because I didn't have particularly long wires on the fans. Adding another fan to the RheoBus at this stage will be tricky (I'll have to unscrew the fans again), so it might pay to spend some time extending the cabling on your fans before hooking it all up.
I originally wanted to use this kit in the Yeong Yang Cube case I'm doing a bit of modding too, but the knobs stick out too far from the drivebay to fit inside the door on that case.. so instead I'm using it on the Hyena midtower. No big deal, but be aware the knobs stick out a bit. The cube case has weird pre-ventilated covers so it was probably a doomed idea from the start.
Knobs
I did kinda skip the knob-attachment above, because I wanted to
make a couple of points about it. Firstly, the knobs look pretty
good, but they could be better. They're fairly roughly finished
aluminium, not of, say, hifi-equipment standard. I would have
preferred a more chromey, sharper looking knob. Aesthetics aside,
I have a pretty severe gripe with the way they're mounted. The
rheostat shafts are essentially cylinders with a flat face cut
down one side. The knobs have a small screw in the side which
you turn - it drives itself down into the knob, pressing against
the shaft inside the knob and holding the knob in place. This
is all fine, except that the screw uses an extremely small hex-head.
I've got two sets of allan keys here and neither have a head small
enough. Even my funky Madonion Mega-tool doesn't have a head small
enough. I resorted to using a small jeweller-type flat-head screwdriver
which would fit inside the head, but I couldn't produce enough
force to secure the first knob in place. I mentioned this problem
to PC Case Gear and to their credit they responded quickly - with
the suggestion to use a small screwdriver in the absence of an
allan key. I decided to forge ahead using pliers for extra leverage
- this had the effect of twisting the the blade of the screwdriver
and essentially destroying it. A slightly less polite email to
PC Case Gear had them sending me a spare kit in case mine was
faulty. This second unit was unfortunately the same - but as it
was already assembled I was able to see what the problem was.
The instructions say to screw the knob into the flat face of the shaft.. but the little screws just aren't long enough for that. The pre-assembled second unit had the knobs screwed into the shaft OPPOSITE the flat face. This is a lot easier, but in replicating this across all four knobs of the review unit I destroyed another small screwdriver. Sure, they're fairly cheap tools and perhaps others wouldn't have this problem, but the inclusion of a correctly-sized allan key would make this whole problem go away. Hopefully PCMods, who manufacture the kits, will notice this review and consider such an inclusion - which would remove my only real gripe with the unit.
LED's
There's a fairly disturbing episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation
where Captain Picard is captured and tortured by the Cardassians.
He spends much of the episode shouting "THERE ARE FOUR LIGHTS!"
and I confess I had the urge to do the same when first firing
up the RheoBus. The scene in question looks almost entirely unlike
this:
..which of course is the front of my LAN box, not a secret Cardassian torture facility. But there are some similarities. These LED's are bright. Digital-camera-confusing bright. Surgeon-General-Warning bright. I'm serious, looking directly into these things even on the low power setting is bound to do horrible things to your eyes/brain. They're hooked up to the rheostats too - when a fan is connected to a channel on the RheoBus the LED turns on, with brightness varying as per the current being provided to the fan. Slow fan, bright light. Fast fan, mind-numbingly bright light. Very cool.
From an angle the LED's are still pretty bright, but it's when you get directly ahead of them that you really get dazzled. They throw out a narrow cone of light and were easily bright enough for me to play shadow puppets on the opposite wall of my computer room, maybe 15 feet away.
Something to note is that, of the 4 or 5 fans I tested with it, only the Panaflo 120mm could start spinning when powered up at the lowest RheoBus setting. The other fans would stay still or rock slightly - either way the LED for that channel would blink. A quarter-turn would get them all spinning again, and all fans would run indefinitely on the lowest setting once they'd started spinning.
Conclusions
I quite liked the RheoBus. It's a little fiddly to install - about
a zillion times less fiddly than building one of these things
yourself, but still fiddly enough that you get a sense of acheivement
when you've got it all working. With the ultrabright blue LED's
it's got spectacular "look at me" value at LAN parties
- almost "look at me then scream in pain and slap your hands
over your eyes" value, in fact. It doesn't have the (alleged)
automatic fan-control convenience of the DigiDoc5 and doesn't attempt to offer monitoring,
but to be honest the fan control works a lot better on the RheoBus.
No fiddling with "trigger temperatures" here, just turn
knob one way, fan speeds up. Turn knob other way, fan slows down.
It's simple and it works. Some will call the RheoBus expensive,
but it's one of those things that will exist across many incarnations
of your PC and in the grand scheme of case-modding it's not too
pricey an item. If you're after the functionality it provides,
I'd recommend picking one of these up.
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