Akasa AK-FC-05 Fan Control+ review

Ok, I’ll admit it, I’ve got that cooling bug which not only means I spend endless amounts of cash trying to get the utopian quiet and fast PC but it also drives my girlfriend up the wall with endless gadgets arriving at my door. Enter the Akasa Fan Control+.

The Fan Control+ ships in well designed yellow packaging which strangely increased my confidence in this product. But looks can be deceptive, so I forced myself not to be swayed too much by the packaging.

On assembly, I had a few problems understanding the pigeon English manual - something that seems to come as standard with most PC components these days. That said, I needn’t have worried since it was fairly straight forward to get the Fan Control+ hooked up and the ‘Y’ cables supplied to connect all your fans to motherboard and the Fan Control will only fit one way, so you don’t have to worry about misaligning anything.

The Fan Control+ slots easily into a 5.25in drive bay and comes complete with metal brackets that allow you to install a hard drive behind it. This means that you won’t be making a drive bay redundant by using this fan controller.

The instructions warn that a temperature sensor should not be placed between the heatsink and CPU, but I’d be amazed if anyone attempted to do this anyway. Realistically you want to place the sensors in positions where you can get a good reading of ambient system temperature or near core components like the CPU, graphics card and hard disk.

After 10 minutes with my head inside the case I successfully managed to power up the PC and I was greeted by a blue illuminated front panel with an LCD readout displaying the current temperature for both of the sensors.

The LCD also displays the RPM of the fans, although I was dismayed to find that it takes approximately three seconds to update after you adjust the speed. A nice subtle feature however, is that the illumination of the fan control brightens as you crank up the power.

The panel has a built-in overheating alert. All you have to do is set the sliding switch to 45, 55 or 65 degrees. If your system gets hotter than this temperature, then you will be notified by a kitchen timer type alarm and a flashing LCD.

In the box you will also find three replacement fascias. You can choose from transparent blue, smoked or just plain old frosted transparent which allows you to see the aluminium build of the fan controller. But be careful when you screw them on with the supplied Allen key, it’s difficult to feel the resistance of the screw and I managed to make a slight crack on one of the covers by tightening too far.

The fan controller also features two USB 2.0 ports which I found extremely useful as I am often annoyed by ATX cases which mount the front panel ports at the very bottom of the front fascia.


Verdict

In conclusion, this is a great looking product for anyone who likes to be in total control of their PC’s cooling – and there’s something very pleasing about the illuminated readout on your case. The USB 2.0 ports are useful and you can always pop a hard drive behind the device to make the most of the space in your case. One thing that I would have liked to see is some kind of automated function which will keep your PC at a certain temperature without your intervention – but then again, maybe that defeats purpose of having a manual fan controller.