NZXT Sentry 2 Performance Touch Screen Fan Controller Review

Operating the NZXT Sentry 2

Using the Sentry2 is fairly simple. I did have to reference the instructions once or twice to try and get a feel on how to use the fan controller, but once I had the basics, everything else just fell into place. When the computer first started up, the default settings are being used which is temperature in Celsius, fan 1 is displayed and all fans are in auto mode. In auto mode, the speed of the fans will be automatically adjusted based on the temperature of the corresponding probes. This is why during installation, the probes are located near the fans so cooling and power consumption can be optimized.

By pressing and holding the temperature in the upper left corner, the display can be changed from Celsius to Fahrenheit. By just touching the temperature in the upper left corner, the temperature at which an alarm will sound can be set. By default, the temperature is set to 70 Celsius or 158 Fahrenheit on all five channels, but can be raised or lowered using the plus or minus buttons on the bottom left.

When we press the blue fan on the right, we can cycle through the fans, one through five, and view the temperatures and fan speeds for each one. As you can see below, I did not have a fan attached to the power 5 connector. The Sentry 2 still displays the temperature, but shows a 0% fan speed. After the fifth fan, the controller goes into a sixth display which is not well explained in the instructions. It says that all five fans are shown at the same time, which makes no sense. The fan controller is either showing the fan with the highest speed or showing an average of all five fans. My feeling is that it is showing the highest fan speed of the five which should be documented in the instructions. One thing it doesnt show in this selection is a temperature. I would think that if the fan controller was going to show me the fan with the highest speed, it would also show me the temperature for that channel. It does no good to show me a fan that is running higher then normal, but have to cycle through the fans to find out what the temperature is for that fan.

Another feature that the Sentry 2 has is the ability to switch to manual mode and adjust the speed of the fans individually. By default the speed is set to 100% on all five channels, but can be raised or lowered using the plus or minus buttons on the bottom left of the display screen.

The last two buttons are the reset and lights off buttons. The reset button is almost self explanatory; it resets all the settings back to the factory settings. This button is located in the top right hand corner denoted by the “R” in the blue circle. The lights off button is located right below the reset button and is used to turn off the display. This doesnt mean that the fan controller is not operating; it just means that nothing is displayed on the touch panel. Pressing the button again, returns the display to its normal configuration.