Modern-V - Fan Controller and Monitor Author: faceless105 -- Posted: 2008-08-18
We really love to see products aimed at performance. Additionally you can really tell the products that started as a great idea and the ones that became great ideas. Today we'll be reviewing the Modern-V Temperature Monitor by AeroCool.
Right out of the box, the Modern-V is pretty large. It occupies two drive bays, which should fit in nicely with the majority of your standard setups. Now the Modern-V is a pretty clean device. It monitors temps and fans, but it was really able to keep the wires down to a minimum, which is a pretty huge relief from someone's who's really had to deal with some crazy products.
The Modern-V monitors up to four fans, and their corresponding temperatures. There are four assumed areas, which are the most likely you'd use, but really it's completely up to you. These four areas cover the over all system temperature, CPU, graphics card, and hard drive.
* picture taken with low light to show the LCD brightness more effectively.
The Modern-V is designed to be very human friendly. That's something I do want to stress too. My experiences with Aerocool have been pretty great, they go above and beyond on their products and you get the feeling that this company is full of people who use the products they're selling, which doesn't seem to be the case a lot of the time.
Each of the four monitors can have different temperature alarms programmed in. you can switch between auto and manual fan speeds, which is always a nice feature. Keeping with how international this industry is, you can also designate to have temperatures displayed in either Fahrenheit or Celsius. While the US still uses Fahrenheit, it's nice to be able to jump to Celsius to compare your temperatures to others (since most of the world uses Celsius and online recorded temps are rarely in Celsius).
Before I go into the installation I also want to point out that the Modern-V comes with an additional two thermal probes. This is part of the stuff I'm talking about when I say how these guys go above and beyond. This is really convenient since this style of thermal probes are historically flimsy. Replacement is a very simple matter of unplugging the defective probe and plugging the new one in.
Installation is very straight forward. The device takes up two drive bays but like I said, this isn't a problem on the majority of the systems out there. I'd recommend connecting all your fans and power to the Modern-V while it's hanging out the drive bay, and leave securing it as the last step.
Overall I'm very impressed with the Modern-V. Aerocool makes a great line of products and so far in my experience it's hard to go wrong with them. If you guys are in the market for a new fan/temperature monitor I'd start my search with the Modern-V. If space is an issue, I'd recommend their FP-01, which will only monitor 3 fans and temps, but it'll also combo as a card reader, and takes up only one drive bay.
If anyone has any questions or comments I'd love to hear them :)
