okay so today I'll be unboxing the aerocool V12 XT this is a touch LCD fan
controller so you can see right off the bat it is a dual Bay controller and it
sits in two 5 and 1/4 in Bays they have
a finger here so and it's called a touch LCD fan controller so this is a
touchscreen LCD display that you see on the front and uh you know what why don't
we just go ahead and work our way around the box and see if we can find out some
more information so other languages are on the sides but English being
apparently the most important to Arrow cool oh and look they've even started
the package open for me so I can just uh rip off the plastic very easily without
a knife okay almost I you know I was doing
really well there ah there we go yes no
knife success okay so let's have a look
at the features on the back so you got a large LCD screen 2x 5 and 1/4 inch Bay
which I already covered Innovative touch LCD
technology racer style fan controller design so they've designed it to look
kind of like a speedometer and then a tachometer which is kind of cool if
you're into that monitors and control four sets of temperature and fan speeds
individually the LCD backlight can be either on or off you can switch between
Celsius and Fahrenheit I've actually seen this feature missing on fan
controllers before and it drives me crazy because everyone sets it to
Fahrenheit by default and in Canada we use celsius overheating alarm
temperature warning hard drive working display okay so you can plug this into
your hard drive LED uh header on your motherboard lock function provided to
prevent careless mouch that's kind of neat okay so why don't we get this
opened up and have a look inside the
first thing we will find is the unit oh
and then okay good there is some documentation I thought there was Zero
documentation inside and I was going to freak out because uh then I would have
nothing to talk about except what I already just talked about so why don't
we have a look at the documentation first number one is a user manual so
this unfolds pretty good here I did it again okay so here English
the fen controller is operated by a touch LCD screen okay we got that much
okay you can browse fan speed select a fan of your choice from fan one to Fan 4
to view the fan speed so you just touch it on the fan speed and then browsing
temperatures you can select a Channel of your choice to view the temperature and
the thermometer display so you can choose either CPU VGA hard drive or
system and then you'll get a temperature reading right here uh key lock and
unlock so you can unlock or lock it setting fan speed okay so you touch to
unlock the LCD touch fan one to see the RPM display and then you touch the
digits inside the pink Square I don't see a pink Square huh
okay well you touch the digits inside the pink Square the digits begin to
Blink and then you touch plus or minus to adjust the fan speed at 100 RPM
intervals very cool okay around the other side and this is you okay so it
shows you basically how to change change every aspect of this displays and touch
screen and fan controllers settings okay
so here is how to replace heat
sensors or how to install the heat sensors I guess so you split the cables
and then run them to wherever you want them to go so you can see they've got the little temperature sensors here and
then you unplug the failed fan C oh replacing a fan cable they're showing
you how to replace failed cables that can't happen that often okay so why
don't we have a look at the accessories that are included right off the bat here
and uh okay everything seems to be
mostly pre-attached to the unit but why don't we have a look at what's in this
bagy first so the first thing we have are little adhesive strips okay the next
thing we have are what appear to be some extension cables so we have two fan
extension cables here okay and then we have two temperature sensors so these
seem to be Replacements yeah so they've included instructions and Replacements
just in case the fan cables or temperature sensors here fail well
that's very helpful of them at any rate they're covering all of their bases here
then we have eight installation screws that we can use to install this into two
5 and a/4 in bays and then why don't we
have a look at this guy here so it uses
steel construction on the side so you I've seen too many that use like an
aluminum sheet here that's not thick enough but you can see this is not going
to flex and bend because what can happen is while you're installing it you might
need to pinch them a little bit tight to get it into the front of the case and
then they don't go they don't go back into place and it's hard to screw them in from the side so they've thought of
that which is very helpful and why don't we just uncoil all the cables that are
plugged into the back of this guy and then we you can have a look at how long
the cables are for one thing because that's another big complaint that I've
had about fan controllers in the past is if the cables aren't long enough to
reach something then it's not very helpful at all is it okay so oh this is
kind of neat okay so while this fan controller doesn't use pwm technology it
just uses straight DC to control the fans what they've done is they've made
it so that the three Pin cable goes out to a 4pin compatible cable so you can
either plug a three pin fan or a four pin fan into this in order to get the
most out of your compatibility for different fans and I don't know what
this does this is interesting so this is an RP p m sensor that also includes
another ground so you could potentially
plug a fan into here and then you could
take this out and plug it into an RPM
sensor on your motherboard but you've already got an RPM sensor on the fan
controller so it seems to be all about redundancy with this thing it's got
alarms for if your fans fail you can plug it into your motherboard so your
motherboard can set off an alarm if your fan fails this is all about system
safety and temp sensors so these are oh
you know what I never showed you how long these cables were did I okay so the
cables are about this long that is all okay and then for the
temp sensors these are actually hot glued in okay but they should come off
fairly easily if you really wanted to do that so you've got the four temp sensors
and then you've got see this red stripe down at the other end that is the hard
drive LED so not only can you plug this
into the hard drive LED header on the motherboard then you can take your case
hard drive LED and plug it into this one
so they'll both go off whenever you access your hard drive redundancy there
you go so this thing is taking functions that you could have already done and
doing them better but then you also still have the old functionality that's
awesome because I hate it when you plug in like a front panel uh like a new
front panel thing and then what it does is it just makes the stuff that came
with your case dead like if you plug in like a like a 5 and a/4 in so the full
SD card cut me off in the middle of my rant about how um duplicated
functionality on a front panel thing that you add to your system might render
something else useless like if you buy something that has an ESAT port on the
front and then you have to unplug the es SATA port on your case in order to make
that one work is like pretty stupid but this one makees sure that you don't run
into that problem so I've actually in the time I've been off camera plugged in
a couple of fans okay into the back back of the unit so I plugged one in using
their extension cable and I plugged one in directly so you can see the back
light from around the side of the PCB and you can actually see the front
display so um yeah we're monitoring the
RPM of fan number one right now it's at
uh 1700 and then 2600 RPM and then 1200
RPM I'm not sure how completely accurate
that is but honestly I don't think it really matters okay I think it's
unlocked right now and I think I can adjust it I don't know I didn't the
instructions very carefully on how to adjust the fan speed but one thing I did notice is that if you unplug it oh
there's an alarm there you go there's your alarm anyway thank you for checking out my unboxing today of the V12 XT Fen
controller from a aerocool