Date: October 11th, 2009
Article by: Joe Anderson (Hardware Reviewer)
Edited By: Nathan Glentworth (Owner / Head Editor)
Product was submitted by: Aerocool
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CONCLUSIONS AND AFTERTHOUGHTS
With the Touch 2000, AeroCool has produced a worthy successor to their popular line of bay fan control devices. This device is feature rich, user friendly has a bright, vivid touch screen that just begs the user to tweak their fans for optimal cooling or minimal fan noise. It's easy to install and will work with most any 3-wire fan with a 3-pin connector. The alarm feature will alert the user to any cooling problems, and the I/O ports will be more convenient than the native ports on some cases. It looks good too, with its black, brushed aluminum panel and diamond-cut accent.
The Touch 2000 worked flawlessly, for the most part during testing. My only complaint was the lack of functionality for the display on/off feature. Also, for enthusiasts with windowed cases, the wiring and thermistor leads may present some wire management issues, but this is really a small price to pay for the other outstanding features that the Touch delivers.
Available online for around $60 US, the Touch 2000 is a pretty good value, too. While not cheap, the unit is competitively priced amongst its peers and looks and performs better than many of them. AeroCool also includes a couple of extra thermistors and some high-quality tapes to secure them, a nice touch. If you're contemplating a fan control unit, AeroCool's Touch 2000 deserved a look.
Reviewer's Addendum
During the course of this review, I found that I was unable to get the LCD backlight feature to work as advertised. To make sure this was not a flaw, we tried to make it work several times. Aerocool requested us to send the unit back and they were not able to reproduce the problem. The unit was returned and was functioning properly. We now have a fully functional Touch-2000 LCD controller panel in the lab and, with all features working properly, it has proven itself to be an excellent product.
Pros:
- Great look
- Feature rich
- Vivid, informative touch screen
- Four channel fan control
- Four zone temp monitoring with alarm feature
- Comes complete with extra thermistors and tapes
Cons:
- Display on/off feature didn't work on this sample
- Takes up two bays
- Cable management may be troublesome
If you have any questions about this product, you can ask them HERE.
