Introduction
Two of the more common mods in a modder's kit would have to be the fan and the fancy lighting. Eventually someone thought of combining the two by including LEDs on fans, and then making the fans transparent.
But LEDs didn't quite have the penetrating power of the other popular form of case lightning - the cold cathode.
The packaging hides what is quite a well-featured kit. Now Sunbeam Tech has combined the two with their Cold Cathode Flourescent Light fan, combining the cooling of a fan with the excellent lighting power of a cold cathode. The kit is quite well featured, containing the fan, screws, an expansion-slot switch, inverter, power cable and sticky pad for mounting the inverter on.
Looking at the fan itself, aside from the transparent plastic it's basically your standard run-of-the mill 80mm fan. Depending on if you like your coffee black or white, plugs are there for both the 3 pin motherboard power connector (including RPM monitoring) and 4 pin molex. Another nice touch is the transparent plastic sleeve which encases the motherboard plug's wires which help neaten things up.
The blue halo pictured above is the bracket which attaches to the fan. It's only held in by 4 screws and 4 nuts, so removal and relocation/rotation is a simple affair. This is quite a nice feature, as it stops you from being stuck with the fan sucking or blowing - move the bracket to the other side of the fan and you can mount it in your case the other way.
The supplied inverter. Two wires coming from the cathode plug into the inverter, pictured above. The inverter can power up to 2 cathodes, so should you buy a second fan, or already have a cathode in your system, then you can plug them both into one inverter, removing the need to have 2 inverters, switches, wiring, etc.
The next interesting part of the kit is what the inverter plugs into - a switch.
The expansion-slot switch. With most normal kits you'd expect just a molex connector here, but as a nice bonus there's an expansion slot bracket with a switch mounted into it. Screw this into an expansion slot on your case, hook it up and you've got an easy way to turn the cathode on and off without taking the case side off, or drilling holes into a faceplate. Hook the switch up to the provided pass-through connector and you're done.
|