NZXT Sentry 2 Fan Controller Review

Installation

In Figure 3, you can see the rear side from Sentry 2. Temperature sensor, main power and fan output cables came connected and glued to the circuit board.

Figure 3: Rear view.

To install Sentry 2 in your case, just remove one 5 ¼" bay cover, put the controller on it and attach two screws (or use the screwless retention system if your case have one). After that, connect it to the power supply with one standard peripheral connector, stick the temperature sensors on the spots you want to monitor and connect up to five fans on the outputs.

The temperature sensors came protected by plastic tubes and their installation is very simple, you just need to stick them on the points you want to monitor, like the motherboard chipset heatsink, hard disk drive and memory heatsink. Regarding the CPU sensor, keep in mind you cannot put it between the CPU and the cooler, because if you do so the heatsink will not be in direct contact to the CPU and will not properly cool it. In this case, you must put the sensor as close as possible to the cooler base.

Figure 4: Temperature sensors.

In Figure 5, you can see the fan connectors. Each one of the five outputs has two connector types: one three-pin miniature connector and one four-pin standard peripheral connector ("Molex"). But we didn’t like these connectors by some reasons. First, the miniature connectors, besides having no rotation sensor, is not compatible with four-pin miniature connectors with the PWM pin. So if you have a fan that uses this connector (most CPU coooler fans use this connector) you can’t connect it to Sentry 2, unless you cut part of the connector.

Second problem we found is the fact that if you connect your CPU cooler fan to Sentry 2 the motherboard can’t monitor the fan speed. It could follow the example of Touch-2000 and include a small extension wire connecting the rotation sensor pin from the CPU fan to the motherboard connector.

The third thing we found strange is that NZXT used a male standard peripheral power connector, instead of a female one. By default fans that use this connector are pluged directly to the power supply, which uses female plus. So, the fans use male connectors and the controller outputs also use male connectors. Luckly most fans come with both connector types (male and female), so you probably won’t have any trouble installing them.

Figure 5: Fan outputs.