You know that old saying about having cake and eating it to? That never made sense to me. If you’re going to buy or make a damned cake, you better end up in a diabetic coma over it. If you’re going to buy a set of matching fans, why not use the Sentry LX to make sure you’re getting the most out of those babies?
Right out of the box, the Sentry is something to behold. Bundles of power plugs and temperature sensors adorn the black aluminum frame that is housing the huge LCD display screen. A small plastic bag contains extra sensor wires and a battery for the system’s memory. A memory for your fan controller, rather than a set of knobs that are adjusted all the time. I’m all for it. I hate twisting those knobs. This is the computer age, knobs died out with cassette tapes and AM radio. And finally, beneath the gear, is the instruction manual. But who needs that? On with the testing.
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(Just kidding, you better use that instruction manual or risk electrocution. PCs 101)
Installation is a breeze. Damn… another pun. Keep in mind that the Sentry is going to take up two bays rather than the one that a traditional fan controller would. I didn’t realize until I took the side of my case off that I had shoved my hanging PSU wires into the empty bays of the case. That was a lot of fun to rearrange. But once I had them tied back and out of the way, I proceeded to install the Sentry LX and hook a few things up. Of the five available fan plugs, I used the first two to control the lower front 120mm fan, the side fan that feeds air directly to the CPU, and the CPU heatsink fan itself. I then slid a couple of the sensors under the chipset’s heatsink and under the heatsink of my graphics card. After that was all done, I plugged in the power and made sure the batter was secure before putting the side back on my PC.
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At first startup, the LCD reads January 1st, 2008. With a simple press of the SET button, I was able to cycle through the date, time, and AUTOMATIC/MANUAL modes to make sure everything was adjusted to my liking. I found this surprisingly easy considering how complex this thing seemed to be. Obviously we at OCModshop know how to extract the goodies out of something like this, but I believe this would be easy for even the most novice of computer users to figure out. And by simply pressing the FAN SELECT button, you can cycle through the fans that are connected to adjust the speed to what you want. I wanted to see how loud this thing would get, so I decided to crank all of them up. Where would the fun be if I didn’t?
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At the highest settings, my PC had the decibel equivalent of a typical system using the motherboard to control the fans. It wasn’t very loud, even at the highest available speed of 1800rpm on all three fans. At the lowest setting, 700rpm, it was barely audible. The temperature began to slowly climb, however, and I set the Sentry back to AUTO mode to see what it felt the best speed was. It settled each fan in the 1400-1700rpm region, and I was satisfied with the results. In Auto mode, the inner temperature of the case never climbed above 29.5C and the chipset temperature hovered around 40C the whole time.
