Post
by samuelmorris » Thu Sep 11, 2014 12:33 pm
OK, the NZXT Grid+ is in.
Installation was pretty straightforward, the 'click-in-place' velcro-style pads seem to work well, but time well tell how long the adhesive on the other side lasts! Ideally I'd have liked to see some screw-based mechanism where you could use a 3.5" or PCI slot, but no matter. The software install was moderately easy, I needed to manually do an 'update driver software' on the device in devmgmt to get the unit to be recognised by CAM, but once I did that up it came. Good job really - the link to the driver on the NZXT site is a 404!
Ideally speaking I think I'd have liked a unit with physical probes, but given the questionable accuracy of these in the past, as well as adding to cabling mess, I'm glad the software makes moderately decent use of internal sensors. Really, for a file server it'd be nice to be able to adjust fans on the temperature of the disks, but given CAM can't read the temperature values of the disks from my Adaptec controller, that's irrelevant I suppose. Two things disappoint me about the software that I'd like to see changed in a future release:
- All fans are controlled centrally. That's not really all that ideal when you want to target specific ventilation spots. Sure, the automatic sensor may be CPU-based, but I'd at least like to be able to manually control the fans independently.
- Automatic temperature control only works in 10ºC increments. That's pretty steep. Really I'd have liked to see at least 5ºC, if not 1ºC increments to make the fan noise change less abrupt. I have no need for anything but quiet mode up until 50ºC inclusive, but at 60, I want the fans going pretty fast to deal with that situation - I never want to see the temps reach 70 in the first place, so it stands to reason that should be 100%. This basically leaves me with quiet, noisy, and full speed as a 3-step process, with no gradual changes in between. I'm pleased I've managed to get something to control all 5 case fans at once automatically according to my preferences, that's leaps ahead of the motherboard fan controller, but it could be a lot better. Individual fan control per-degree per-fan might seem like overkill, but I don't see why it'd be so hard to implement, clearly a lot of time has gone into CAM's user interface, as although the 30 second loading time at startup is pretty painful, it's quite a well thought out bit of software I think.