mCubed T-Balancer

Introduction

If there is one single thing that irritates me the most in a PC, it is noise. True, after a while you get used to some of the noise, but it is always there in the background giving you a headache and just annoying you.

There’s many ways to reduce the noise. In my main rig, I use water cooling. It helps a lot since I remove most of the fans. There still is some noise from the remaining fans, but it is much better than before. Another way to reduce noise is to use some kind of fan controller that reduces the fan speed when it is not needed. Today, I am looking at one of those controllers – the MCubed T-Balancer. It was actually one of our forum users (MagnusT) who told me about this fan controller (he sells it) and who set me up with MCubed, and I am very happy he did because this is a kickass fan controller.

Building a HTPC

Before going into more detail about the MCubed T-Balancer, I want to tell you what I needed it for. As I told you earlier, my main rig today is water cooled. Thus, it really didn’t need to be controlled that much. Sure, I had a few case fans that could need some slowing down, but I didn’t think that using it in my main rig would be a fair test of the T-Balancer. Then it hit me -- my HTPC (home theater PC)! You will, in a not-too-distant-future, read about how to build a HTPC, but briefly I can tell you that it is a HTPC that I built out of these components:

• DigN HV5 case (http://www.iuneed.com/hv5.html)
• Leadtek Winfast K7NCR18D (nForce2)
• AMD AthlonXP 2000+
• HIS AIW 9600 (fanless)
• Hauppage PVR250
• LiteOn DVDR
• Maxtor 60 GB IDE
• Windows XP MCE 2005

The machine which needs to be silenced

The fans that are present in the machine are a 60mm ADDA case fan, a 60mm PABS fan on the CPU and the small fan in the special small power supply that is included with the case. After building everything together, I quickly realized that the fans still were too noisy to make it really usable out at the TV.  When the T-Balancer arrived, I knew that it would be great for the HTPC.