NesteQ MaxZero Fan Controller

Conclusion

At first I thought perhaps the MaxZero thing was a bit of a gimmick, but having thought about it I can genuinely see the advantages.  First the “Max” part.  When gaming you want all those fans at Max, stopping your silicon from sweating by shifting from inside your case all the heat that your CPU, GPU and various other items of hardware generate.  Your fans are going to be going full tat and making as much noise as their decibel rating suggests they might.  So it’s going to be noisy, but does this matter?  No not really as the sound of your of gunfire, tyre squeal, swords slashes and screams will no doubt drown out any noise your fans are making.

Now picture the scene, there you are, sitting at the PC pretending to be doing some work in a not doing work kind of way.  You’ve been “Working” hard for over an hour now, updating your profiles and checking your mail etc.  You want it quiet, (If only so you can hear someone coming and quickly bring up that spread sheet or word doc you should be working on).  you don’t want whirring fans distracting you from your “work”, you’re quite capable of doing that yourself.  This is where the “Zero” option comes to the fore, with the fans only cutting in when absolutely necessary, and even then only as little as is required.  If the temperature at the sensors doesn’t rise above 45 degrees the fans will never come on.

What can we say of quality and build here?  Well it’s good.  I’d say it was great if the fascia was made from a nice piece of brushed aluminium billet but then the price would most likely be a little higher also, so we have to work with what we have.  The mirror finish to the display is very nice indeed, and as the unit is not a touch screen it’s unlikely to get all smudged up by sticky fingers anytime soon.  Plentiful lengths of wiring both for the fans and the sensors are included but what is becoming an increasingly inexcusable omission in this day and age is that the NesteQ does not have pre braided cables.  Now I’m not singling NesteQ out here.  Pretty much all other manufactures I can think of neglect braiding from their products.  If they can do it with fans and power supplies then they can do it with bay devices and other internal components. 

So with NesteQ’s own mission statement in mind “The products conform with current standards are not good enough for us”how does the MaxZero measure up?

It’s a perfectly competent 8 channel fan controller.  it does what it says on the tin, it looks nice and it’s simple to use.  there’s plenty of competition out there in fan controller land, both from the digital and even touch screen variety all the way down to the good old fashioned analogue controllers.

The “Zero” option does provide a level of functionality that few of the competition can match however which does serve to set it apart from the crowd if only by a small margin.  I’m not sure if it’s perfect, but then I haven’t seen the fan controller that is yet, but this little chap isn’t far off in my opinion.  I’m scoring it pretty high, and if there was something between Silver and Gold that’s what it would get, but as there isn’t then it has to be a strong, very strong Silver