Update: Fan Controller & Lighting
Hello everyone,
I am pleased to bring another small update for my personal Desktop. This time I am adding one thing, but taking away another.
I have always have very mixed feeling about any type of lighting in cases in general, and my feelings have always tended towards not liking it and in most cases thinking it looks tacky. That being said though, I have attempted multiple times throughout the years to come up with elegant lighting in some of my cases without being tacky. So far, the end result of all these past attempts has been getting rid of the lighting all together, and running the case completely stealth with no lighting.
This time is not really an exception, because today I am running my case lighting free once more, and that is how it's going to stay for the near future.
The closet I got to something that I did like, however, was the white string of Leds from the NZXT sleeved LED kit. Mine turned out to be faulty and the LEDs would flicker. I have heard others report this same thing. But I really did like the way the white LEDs would light up the hardware, but not add any tint to it like the coloured LEDs do. I also tried blue, which was okay for a bit, but it took out all of the contrast of the hardware, and made it into one big monotone blue color, which I didn't really like.
I will probably grab a couple more kits of the white LED kits of NZXT later on and install those, but keep them off most of the time, just having it there if I ever want it.
As of right now I am back to just no lighting at all, which has always been, and I syspect will always be my favorite setup.
Here is a picture from today
The second part of this update is about fan controllers.
Recently I bought a Lamptron FC6, which I really like because of the minimal look and feel, and the aluminum finish that matches the 650D case. Once small issue I encountered was that the faceplate of the FC6 was recessed about 3-4mm compared to the bezel of the case when I scred it into the 5.25 bay using the stock mounting holes. This is not a huge issue because I am just going to mark and re drill some holes in the right place so that I can line it up and have the FC6 faceplate flush with the case bezel.
The functionality of this unit is very good, it is very well built and comes with good accessories (sleeved molex extension and sleeved fan extensions) all sleeved in high quality black sleeving. It is simple to install you just connect the fans and its ready to use. You can adjust jumps on the back of the unit to change between about 6 different colors for the display. It controls the fans very nicely, the knobs feel high quality, and one thing i really like about it is if you turn the knobs all the way to the lowest position, the fan will completely stop spinning. So at any given time you can completely control which fans are spinning at what speed, but also have a selection of fans turned right off if you want. This is obviously great if you have a good modern case with good ventilation, and you are not doing very demanding tasks, you could have all your fans right off and it would be completely fine.
Aside from the small issue of the faceplate not liking up, I really like the FC6 and I would highly recommend it to anyone who likes to have manual control of your fans, and also would like to be able to turn you fans on and off whenever you want.
