Silencing The SOHO

As a good portion of computer enthusiasts are on a tight budget, simply replacing their existing fans and heatsinks isn't always an adequate solution. To assist in silencing the fans there's the option for fan controlling devices. What we have with us today offers the ability to manually control up to four cooling fans, and that is the SunbeamTech Lightbus. Although the product is also designed to handle four computer lights with operations such as gradually fading in and out, HDD activity, and sound response, the controller has no problems being used with traditional fans. On the front of the device are simply four knobs with their respective buttons. Unlike the SunbeamTech Chromatic Windmill, there is no flashy LCD panel. At the rear of the device are the four 3-pin connectors, one HDD connector, one audio connector, and the 4-pin molex power connector.

When installing the SunbeamTech Lightbus into one of our SOHO workstations, we simply connected the power connector along with the fan connectors. Although the HDD activity and sound response features would function with the fans installed, it wouldn't be useful for keeping the system cool. However, when using the manual control knob for each of the different channels we encountered no troubles or inconveniences. By using the SunbeamTech Lightbus, it's an easy way to effectively lower the noise level of an existing cooling setup.