Enermax UC-A5FATR2 Fan Controller

On the other side of the rear panel, you can see the small PCB card which regulates the voltage running to the fans. Leading away from it are the six wires to hook your fans into.

As you can see, all the wires are 3-pin connectors. So if you decide to go with this particular panel, make sure you have some 3 to 4-pin converters. For me it was no problem as I've got plenty laying around here. But not everyone is going to have a buncha extra stuff just lying around. Sure, not all fans are have the 4-pin Molex connectors, but most of them are... especially case fans. It would have been a nice extra if Enermax had included at least three converters with this thing. Also something to note are the cable lengths here. While not overly short, they are short enough to make reaching all of your fans a slight problem, especially if you like to hide as much cable clutter as you can.

Well, we've shown you what it looks like outside and inside....how about with a case? Since our review sample is the standard aluminum one, I'm gonna pop it into the Cooler Master ATC 201.

Turning the computer on gave me somewhat of a pleasant surprise. I was expecting the normal greenish color backlight for the display and instead was pleasantly surprised with this cool blue backlight. Very Star Trek-ish looking. I'm sorry for the pic quality, but I'm not a photographer. I had a very hard time with the lighting here. But you get the idea.

Checking the unit out, we did run into a few problems. One of our fan control channels did not work at all. It would not supply power to the fan it was hooked up to. A closer inspection showed us nothing visibly wrong with the connections to the PCB. With this in mind, we decided to try the multiple fans per channel and see what happened. Each of the channels handled two and three fans fine, so I'm going to assume that our unit just had that one bad channel before we got it. 

Conclusion

With it's all aluminum construction and blue backlighting, it's a very sleek looking unit. But looks alone cannot detract from it's faults. The fact that our review sample had a bad fan control channel is very serious flaw. Also of note is that it would have been nice if Enermax would include some 3 to 4-pin wire converters. To be honest, with the quality that Enermax puts into their power supplies and cases, I was very disappointed in the fan controller. But on the plus side, the other controllers were able to handle more than one fan each. So if you do have one and you lose a channel, not to worry.

Pros:

• All aluminum construction

• Six fan channels

• Two temperature probes

• Alarm feature

• Great looking blue backlight

Cons

• Faulty fan controller

• Need at least 2 longer wires to reach some fans

• No 3 to 4-pin wire converters

• Manual

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