Kingwin Thermal Center (TC-02S)

The large circle you see below holds a mainboard type battery so your settings and time (time as in time of day) can be stored.  To the right of the battery holder you will see three fan headers.  Each is individually labeled as CPU, HDD or SYS.  As a matter of fact, Kingwin has labeled all the connections and lines as one of these three to avoid any cross connections as you wire things up.  The center pic shows the two pin connectors that your thermal probes attach to.  You can see the labeling here also.  The pic on the right had me scratching my head a bit.  What this turns out to be, is a hard drive activity indicator on the LCD display.  It has two connectors so the signal is fed into the Kingwin Thermal Center and from there out to your mainboard.  I'm not exactly sure why you would need this but it is fairly hip all the same.

     

My first disappointment came when I examined the thermal probes more closely.  I have become accustomed to the thin lead types that can be fished between a CPU's pins and the mainboard socket.  It was surprising to see the larger line type used here.  While not as delicate as the thin leads, the larger ones do limit you to some small degree, where you can place the probes to monitor things, namely underneath a processor.  The next pic is the HDD extension cable that hooks into the unit as we mentioned in the previous paragraph.

  

Operation

Installation was easy as eating pancakes.  Hook in your probes and fan power wires and your in business.  The hard drive indicator, pictured on the right below, has several bars that go up and down depending on the activity of your drive.  Again, cool to look at but I'm not sure what its function is.

  

Setting up the Kingwin Thermal Center went fast and smooth.  Depressing the 'select' button makes the clock display at the upper center, hour counter flash.  Oops, did I mention it has a 24 hour clock display?  When something is flashing it may be changed using the 'up' and 'down' buttons.  Pushing the 'select' button again cycles through all the adjustable figures.  Hours > Minutes > CPU alarm temp > HDD alarm temp > SYStem alarm temp > Celsius or Fahrenheit > then repeating back to Hours.  Under power, the display cycles through the CPU, HDD and SYS readings every few seconds. 

     

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