Overclockers Australia!
Make us your homepage. Add us to your bookmarks  
Major Sponsors:

News
Current
News Archive
SEND NEWS!

Site
Articles & Reviews
Forums
Wiki
Podcast
Pix
Search
Contact

Team OCAU
Folding Team
Seti@Home Team
Climate Prediction

Misc
OCAU Sponsors
OCAU IRC
Online Vendors
Motorcycle Club

Sunbeam Tech 80mm Cold Cathode Fan
Join the community - in the OCAU Forums!
Date 10th February, 2003
Author sabretooth
Manufacturer Sunbeam Tech
Vendor PC Range


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.

Click to Enlarge
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.

Click to Enlarge Click to Enlarge

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.

Click to Enlarge Click to Enlarge

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.

Click to Enlarge
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.

Click to Enlarge
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.



Advertisement:

All original content copyright James Rolfe.
All rights reserved. No reproduction allowed without written permission.
Interested in advertising on OCAU? Contact us for info.

Hosted by Micron21!
Advertisement:

Recent Content


Mini Server Rack
Gashapon



SpaceX Starlink



T-Force Cardea
Zero Z330 NVMe SSD



Team Group T-Force
Vulcan G SSD



Synology DS720+ NAS



Raspberry Pi 4
Model B 8GB



Retro Extreme!