- Back to homepage
- Related articles
  Related articles

T-Balancer TBAN-XL Review: The Knobless Fan Controller

Modding/Small Mods by jmke @ 2004-09-14

World?s most advanced fan controller? But how, it has no knobs to turn? An Austrian company made a stand-alone high tech unit which can be controlled completely from within Windows. Is it any good? Find out in this review.

Installation

Test setup

Madshrimps (c)

Antec Lanboy (1x 80mm intake / 1x 80mm outtake, both Aerocool LEDfans)

AMD A64 3000+

MSI K8N Neo

2x512Mb PC3200 Corsair LL & 1x 512Mb PC3200 Mushkin Lvl2

Chaintech Geforce FX5900XT

2x Maxtor 80/200GB SATA HDD

NEC 4x DVDwriter

This setup is noisy with all fans running at full speed, especially the A64 default heatsinks’ fan. With MSI’s core center you can drop the speed of the CPU fan which reduces noise quite a bit but not nearly enough. So let’s get the T-Ban in place to see if it can quiet down this setup.

Using the Velcro pads I attached the unit at the bottom of the case:

Madshrimps (c)

Then I stuck each temp sensor in a different place using the included sticky stickers. Once these things are in place they can be removed easily with a bit of force, but the stickers are then ruined and getting the goop of the sensor and the surface where it was attached to can take some time. Better get it right first time around.

First one goes onto the CPU heatsinks, make sure not the place it in a spot where air blows over, this will decrease the sensor’s accuracy:

Madshrimps (c)

Second one on the Southbridge:

Madshrimps (c)

Third on the video card:

Madshrimps (c)

And the last one goes on my 200GB Maxtor HDD, I stuck it to the side as this tends to be one the hottest areas of a hard disk.

Madshrimps (c)

After hooking everything up you better use those cable binders, unless you like it messy

Madshrimps (c)

If you daisy chained the temperature sensors correctly they will light up.

Madshrimps (c)

If they remain dark then you need to turn one of the cables 180° around (angle). After that the T-Balancer is all set and can be configured through Windows 9x/2000/XP (Linux client is coming).

Madshrimps (c)

All information and graphics contained in Madshrimps are sole property of the Madshrimps crew and may not be reproduced or copied in any manner without written permission from us.