Aerocool Touch-2000 Fan Controller Review

Operation

Turning the computer on, Touch-2000 lights as you can see in Figure 5. The panel looks is clean and pleasant, giving an excellent aspect to your computer. The most important info (temperatures and fan speeds) is very clear.

Figure 5: Installed on the case.

In order to make adjustments you need first to unlock the panel, which is done by touching the lock icon available on the center of the panel. This prevents you from accidentaly changing your configuration. To lock again, just touch again the lock icon or wait for 30 seconds and the panel locks itself again automatically.

The touchpanel is very sensitive (you don’t need to use a lot of pressure) and it makes a little beep every time you press it, so you feel like you are really pressing a button.

There’s no need to unlock the panel, however, to change the temperature unit between Celsius and Fahrenheit degrees, which is made by pressing the green button at the center, or to see the temperature set for the alarms, which is done by pressing the temperature values.

Unlocking the panel you can adjust fan speed, touching over the speed value and then pressing the “+” and “-” buttons. You can adjust rotation speed between its maximum and 50% of the maximum. The adjustment doesn’t enter in action instantly; the rotation speed takes some seconds to reach the programmed value.

Temperature alarms can also be programmed individually for each sensor, from 25 °C to 90 °C. To adjust them you need to unlock the panel, press the current temperature value to show at what value the current alarm is set, and then keep pressing the value for two seconds. After that, you just need to set a new value using the “+” and “-” buttons.

The alarm not only warns user about high temperatures: when activated, it also puts the corresponding fan at full speed. So it is a good thing, for example, to connect the temperature sensor number two on the video card and the video card fan to output number two.

Another good feature (mostly if you keep your computer on your bedroom) is that, by pressing the Aerocool logo for two seconds, all the panel lights go off, but the control and alarm funcions stay active. To restore the display light you just need to touch the panel on any place.

A detail we didn’t like on Touch-2000 was that when one fan control channel has no fan connected the rotation value keeps blinking “0000” and we could not disabled this. So if you don’t have four three-pin fans on your chassis, unused channels will be always blinking, drawing your attention and adding visual pollution to the display. It would be better if we had an option to disable those unused fan channels.

Another drawback is the fact that in bright enviroments panel visibility is good only when you look it from straight ahead: viewing it from the side the reflex from light prevents you from reading data. In dark enviroments, however, it looks perfect.