AeroCool CoolPanel2-Black Multi-Funtion Cool Panel with 20 in 1 Card Reader

Pros: Usb ports and Card reader works fine. I didnt bother with the fan control because of all the wires. Temperature display looks good. Overall looks good in the case.

Cons: The cable supplied for the sata power has two female ends. Unless I'm doing something wrong, how you gonna hook it up to the power supply inside the case? If someone knows please comment and help me out lol..

Other Thoughts: Dont count on aero cools support..They dont answer emails. well at least I havent heard from them.

Pros: Removable card reader can be used on other systems with ordinary USB<>USB mini cable. Fast temperature update rate. Card reader has toggleable door to cover the flash card slots.

Cons: The fan speed control interface (see below). Limited fan speed control range. Control channel can't control a C***** ram cooler. Cheesy looking card reader door.

Other Thoughts: For some reason the designers decided to make the least used functions easily available (alarm settings) but access to the more commonly used function, fan speeds adjustment, is suprisingly cumbersome:s 9 button pushes to simply access the first fan's speed adjustment

The fan speed control range is supposedly in 1V steps from 6V to 12V. If accurate, 6V is not low enough to slow common fans down to quietness.

Pros: It offers functional sata external connections including power for testing sata drives with out opening the case.

Cons: the card slots are combo slots and a little akward to use. The front door was missing one of the hinge pins on arrival. The plastic housing construction is unsatisfactory. Over all I was a little dissapointed having already purchased a nicer Multimedia/fan control unit I gave this Aero Cool to my brother who is in the process of piecing together a system

Other Thoughts: Very cheap construction. Not worth $xx.

Pros: It's got almost all the connectors you could want, plus four temp sensors and four fan controllers. It fits in my case and looks good. The removable USB drive reader is pretty neat.

Cons: The temperature sensor probes had loose connections to the header board (fixed with a little strip of cardboard inserted between connectors and unit wall). The audio connector blocks do not conform to the Intel standard, but instead are loose. The USB card reader uses a separate cable from the USB ports, so you need three empty blocks to get everything hooked up. It does not use an e-SATA connector. The fan controller reports generates a signal that my ASUS motherboard really hates (EG, it reports fan speeds of 16k when the speed is controlled by the front panel. It makes a loud beep on startup, but it is very short duration so not too bad--hard to stealth login at night without family knowing though.

Other Thoughts: I buy these because they have all the connections I want, but I usually modify the heck out of them. First I replaced the headphone and microphone jacks (they are on a separate board so they are easy to remove) with an Intel compatible fpaudio cable with a headphone sensor in the jack. Unfortunately the little clasp that holds the door closed blocks the larger microphone jack, so I had to remove that as well (not a problem because I put a thumb screw through the face plate and can open and close as needed). Next I built my own fan-splitter cables, so that the ASUS BIOS can control fan speed, and then just pass RPM signal (only) to the front panel for display, which seems to work fine--the only fan I am controlling with the front panel now is the Vantec on my ATI X1950, and the rest are just RPM monitors. Overall it's the best unit in terms of provided connectors, and it is pretty well made, but they could make major improvements. Good buy if you aren't afraid to mod.

Pros: Nice design with pull out card reader... Disply is very easy to read off angle..I have pc on floor and looking down at display is very easy. Nice array of inputs including SATA.. and Flip Down cover is nice as well.

Cons: Wiring clutter .. which is expected given the number of options. Wish the fan controller went down to 5v rather than 6v..

Other Thoughts: Would love to see some automated variable speed control over fans.

Pros: Lots of features. Card reader, USB, Firewire, audio ports, 4 temp sensors and 4 fan conectors w/ controller.

Cons: Too many wires comming out the back. Would be better if it was a single wire harness instead of a bunch of small wires going everywhere. Uses PWM instead of MOSFETs to control the fan voltage.

Other Thoughts: Great purchase overall, I like the versetility. My comp is much quieter now since I can control the fans.

I regards to the previos review, the whining noise is because the unit uses PWM (pulse-width modulation) to control the fan voltage, which means that it just switches the power on and off rapidly. My unit didnt make any whining noise, but I could hear a faint whine comming from the fans. But its barely audible, so its not a problem.

Pros: It is loaded with functions like control of four fans, four temp sensors, a card reader, front USB, firewire and audio.

Cons: Fan and sensor control interface is very poor. There are four tiny buttons to set the fan RPM alarm and fan speed. The unit makes a whining sound when the voltage for the fans is dropped from 12 down to 9 or lower. I could live with the poor interface but the whining sound is intolerable.

The card reader and front USB have a tendency to be unrecognized on boot-up. Remounting the front USB devices and/or the removable card reader fixes the problem but I shouldn’t have to do this every time I boot-up.
sound is intolerable.

Other Thoughts: Other users complained about the problems with mounting on rails and I've had no problems with this as there are 2 screw holes on each side to attach the rails and using self threading screws. This appears to work and work well.

Pros: Fan control, Temp monitoring, Card reader, nice read out display.

Cons: So so temp probe quaility

Pros: Using this on a linux Fedora Core 5 machine (its a fileserver, and I wanted the ability to monitor temps and control fans externally). FC5 picked up all the memory slot interfaces no problem. Removable module is nice (it has mini USB connector on the back). LCD shows 4 temps and 4 fans speeds at once, all with independent alarms (can see the whole machine status with a glance).

Cons: Drive mount is plastic, half length. Due to the fact that people will be pushing/pulling on this to insert devices (and open the door) it really could have used a full length mount with metal rails. Its sturdy enough, but could have been better. Also, LCD display build quality seems a bit cheap (although when powered up and working it does all work). Some of the connectors are a minus also - couldn't figure out the audio connections (audio is split into single pin connectors). USB also has single pin connectors, but it is fairly easy to work those out.

Other Thoughts: LCD display is odd - if viewed head on it actually looks slightly worse than if viewed at an angle. In an odd way this is nice, as the box is to the side (rarely viewed straight on).

Pros: Great features for its price group. Has alarm feature for both fan RPM and temp probes. Can support up to four fans and is able to control the voltage from 6V to 12V in 1V increments. The removable card reader is pretty sweet.

Cons: Documentation is quite scarce.
Although its true of nearly all fan controllers, since it only utilizes the front portion of screw holes for mounting it is not friendly to cases that use quick-mount rails.
When in alarm mode the poor power circuitry design causes the LCD display to fluctuate between the normal white glow and the red glow when the beeper goes off. All this would need for a fix is cheap capacitor in the LCD power circuitry and poof....issue solved.

The alarm lighting issue and the poor support of highly popular rail-mount cases drops this product to a 4 out of 5.

Other Thoughts: Since the system already hooks up w/ USB for both the hub and the card reader why couldn't they hook the USB into the fan controller board and have a software control interface?
Be an inovative company and extend the mounting pieces to the extent of a normal CD-ROM drive so that systems with quick-mount rails don't need to be modified to install the product.
As far as fan controllers go this one rocks in my opinion and is a worthy investment if looking to spend roughly $xx on a fan controller. Once again Newegg delivers a great deal!