Scythe Kaze Server KS01-BK

[Terje]

Went for a small sightseeing trip through Akihabara yesterday (Tokyo's electronics district) and noticed a fan controller I had not seen before.

The Scythe Kaze Server KS01-BK.

I see that it is fairly new, but there are a few comments in other forums here on SPCR already.

Just to get this into the group where it belongs.

I have only tested this for a few hours, maybe I got a good fit for it, but my initial impression is simple:
If you are thinking about buying a 5 1/4" fan controller, forget everything else, get this one.

I guess I have tried 5 other fan controllers (of the multichannel with display type) over the years and this beats them all.

This thing got some simple modes were you can set a temperature were it will start spinning up the fans.

You can set it to
- fully auto were you set a minimum temp for activating the fan (fan stops below this temperature)
- Semi auto were you set a minimum rpm and a minimum temp for ramping up rpm
- manual were you control the RPM directly

I am running the semi auto now to control fan speed on my two 4870 graphics cards which runs in crossfire.

I use the accelero S2 on these with 2 fans each, but I have a tendency to forget to crank up the fans when I do the occasional game which leads to a crash when the VRMs overheat.

Not anymore with this sweet little thing of a fan controller.

It keeps the fan RPM just perfect. I tend to just crank up to full speed when I game, but this controller keeps the PC more silent during gaming than I ever cared to adjust it.


Just 2-3 hours of testing so far, but first impression is very very good.

It is not perfect though:
- The display is not very good when viewed at an angle
- The alarm goes off at 70C which is useless for VRM control on the 4870 so had to disable it
- The max minimum temperature that can be set is 70C. Fine enough for me in this case as the VRMs idle below and when they climb about, its time for those fans to work, but I can see that people might want to set this higher.

I have no idea how this controller ramps up or anything like that. It does what I need in this case and the first impression is that it does it very very well.

[Hypernova]

Asking this to be sure:

So you can set a case fan at 500rpm and a min of say 30c exhaust. And if it rises to 31 the intake will ramp up till it drops back to 30c?
I have been wondering if that's the case since every review I read so far didn't go into detail about the auto's behaviour and I really wanted it like that.

And how is the speed ramping profile? Once over the limit does it just go from say 50% to 100% in a flash and might even oscillate around the threshold temp value?

[Terje]

Asking this to be sure:

So you can set a case fan at 500rpm and a min of say 30c exhaust. And if it rises to 31 the intake will ramp up till it drops back to 30c?
I have been wondering if that's the case since every review I read so far didn't go into detail about the auto's behaviour and I really wanted it like that.

And how is the speed ramping profile? Once over the limit does it just go from say 50% to 100% in a flash and might even oscillate around the threshold temp value?

In semi auto mode, yes. There you set a minimum RPM and a temperature.

In auto mode, if you are under the set limit (30C in this case) the fan will stop completely.

I tested the auto mode a bit more today.

It might be good if you have a computer which is able to run without fan most of the time and only need fan for shorter times under high load.

The fan controller does not oscillate very quickly. It seems to adjust RPM relatively slowly, but how well it works might depend a bit on how your temperatures changes and the max rpm of your fan and how quickly RPM changes affect the temperature.

It seems successful at stabilizing the fan at some level eventually, but it can take a bit of time, and it seems to take more time when changes to the fan speed causes rapid temperature changes. That is, it overshoots/oscillate more when things are idle than it does under load.

When changes to the fan RPM quickly change the temp, seems to overshoot a lot, stopping the fan on one side and ramping up 100% on the other. It does stabilize, but it takes a while (minutes)

If I was going to guess from my little experimentation today, in auto mode, the fan seems to stop around 1.5C below the adjusted value (2-3% in the test case) and reach max temp 1.2C above.

Basically, it seems like the value you set for temperature is more of a a "target" value than a minimum. It will try to keep you there.

This is probably a bit too rapid. I wish there was some adjustment for that so you could provide a larger range there.

My enthusiasm is a bit reduced right now, this might not be a "one model fits all" controller, but in the settings I started with things works really great for the 4870. Graphic cards today does in a way have 2 work modes. A silent 2D mode and a noisy 3D mode during gaming.

With the semi auto mode, this works very well for me. I put the minimum RPM which keeps the cards silent all the time during 2D work and then it cranks up when the temp is so high there is no doubt that we are talking about 3D gaming. In that case my fans are quiet enough even at full speed to not bother me as the noise in the speakers will cancel most of the fan noise.

Again, the controller seems more successful at dealing with temperature changes under load as well, so it manages to keep me a bit away from the max rpm.

Since I also got two fans per Accellero S2, I have connected one temperature sensor to the GPU and one to the VRM. This seems to work pretty well. The fan over the GPU rarely spins up from the minimum mode, the one over the VRM spins up pretty quickly.

This is actually most likely the main reason that I noticed a lower noise level. I just did not notice it last night.

This is probably not the ideal usage scenario for testing how well this controller works. I might test it on my case and CPU fans a bit later to see if I should by a second controller for that use.

[Hypernova]

Guess semi is the way to go then. Each channel can be auto/semi/manual independently yes? On NZXT's it's an all 4 or nothing deal.

At least is is much more affordable than T-balancers.

[Terje]

Guess semi is the way to go then. Each channel can be auto/semi/manual independently yes? On NZXT's it's an all 4 or nothing deal.

At least is is much more affordable than T-balancers.

Settings independent per channel:
- Mode (auto/semi/manual)
- Minimum fan speed
- Spin up temperature

Global settings:
- Celcius/Farenheit
- 70C temperature alarm
- Display on/off