Introduction

Airflow makes or breaks a system. Unless you're working with a water cooled system your primary concern with cooling is making sure everything is at the proper temperature it needs to be at. To do this we often work like aeronautical engineers planning how the air is going to flow from one spot to the next. Working out setups to push air into a corner that might be more closed off and building up heat compared to where the intake will be and how it will exhaust can often become an art form made of an invisible dance of air current that is only kept in mind by it's creator.

Once it's created, we are left with two paths. Leave it to it's settings and trust it to work how it needs to, or take direct control with a fan controller. Fan controllers have usually been relegated to front drive panels or simple dials that control just the speed without much help to tell what is going on. In the last few years steps have been created to give more control and visual updates, increasing to two bay panels and even slide out ones to give a larger display surface. I've used a few of these in the past and as great as they were when the front of my computer wasn't directly accessible their usefulness began to dwindle and I began to rely on the auto settings for everything.

The NXZT Sentry LXE High Performance Touch Screen Fan controller gives you the ability to place your control where you need it most. If you need the Sentry LXE on a shelf off to the side as a readout, it works just as well as on the desk within arm's reach. Attaching the brushed aluminum display to a PCI card via a ribbon cable is all that's needed, so routing the wire and keeping it out of the way is quite easy to do. Giving direct control over the RPM of 5 fans to handle 5 distinct temperture zones, the Sentry LXE wraps this all up in a large easy to use touchscreen that is no longer relegated to the front of your case to be hidden under a desk.