Introduction

What do you get when you put a bunch of talented Austrians into a small room with a bunch of fans, a few silicon chips and a soldering iron? The world smallest and most advanced fan controller, their miniNG is basically a brain for your fans.

mCubed Tech got some well deserved attention in the past when they released the T-Balancer XL fan controller unit, this advanced kit allows fans, pumps, lights and more goodies to be controlled and it communicates with your PC through USB, so you can configure it in detail through their in-house developed software tool. I can’t believe it’s almost 2 years ago that I reviewed that unit, since then new firmware updates have been released as well as a series of add-ons to control more than just fans inside your system.

When mCubed contacted me again for a new product review I didn’t think they could impress me more than they had with their first fan controller. Was I wrong! The miniNG comes packed in plastic bubble wrap and once unpacked the unit is small enough to fit into the palm of your hand.



At first the minNG doesn’t seem to be a very ambitious device, allowing 2 fans to be connected and their RPMs controlled, there are a set of jumpers included which allow you to configure how the fan’s should speed up/down. 3 of these methods rely on external temp probes; the probes are flat and should fit nicely into the smallest of corners.

Package contents

miniNG

2 temp probes

9 jumpers

small screwdriver

adhesive stickers

communication cable to hook up with T-Balancer XL

Specifications and Functionality

The manual is on the inside of the packing and is quite compact but includes clear pictures and guidelines on how to set the device up. However some knowledge of PC hardware is required and it’s not all too newbie-friendly. I would advise to configure the unit outside the case before you stick it somewhere (out of the way) inside your case. The small jumpers are not too easy to remove when you’ve got the unit placed into a cramped area.



Brain for your fan

A fan is dumb device, it powers up when you plug it in it will run at the maximum speed at all times, you can alter the voltage of the fan through use of a fan controller, this doesn’t make the fan smart though as you still have to do the thinking for it. Recent motherboards have a “smart” fan control option in the BIOS which will increase/decrease voltage to the fan depending on CPU temperatures, it’s a step in the right direction and it’s definitively something you ought to look into for your CPU cooler fan. However this “smart” fan options only works for one fan connector on the board, which is marked “CPU fan”.

All the others fan connectors still work as normal, there are some excellent free software tools like Speedfan which help you to control your motherboard’s fan connectors better, you can set alarm temperatures and have the fan speed up/down, it’s an okay solution but requires again quite a bit of interaction from the user and it doesn’t make the fan smarter, if the fan doesn’t get enough voltage from the motherboard fan header because Speedfan decreased voltage too much, the fan will stop and your system will overheat. Speedfan can be configured to start beeping/blinking when something overheats but it requires your intervention, again, soy you need to set the fan to speed up so it can cool the system.



In the end you’re still left with a fan control system which needs quite a bit of management and supervision. This is where the miniNG steps in, it can make your fan work independently and correctly without any user interaction, speeding up when the temperature rises, slowing down at idle moments and when the fan stops because it’s not been given enough voltage, the miniNG will notice this and increase voltage to make the fan spin again. Although all this doesn’t sound too exiting to the layman it does provide for a trouble free method of reducing system noise.

The miniNG can power any fan, it has enough voltage and amperage, multiple Vantec Tornado/Delta fan’s are no problem, the only requirement is that the fan you are using has a 3-pin connector with RPM signal; if you try to use a fan without RPM signal (or you try to reroute the RPM signal to the motherboard) the miniNG turns into a dumb device letting the fan spin at 100% at all times no matter how you configured it. Luckily about 99% of all fans made for home computers have the required RPM signal, after plugging them into the miniNG the unit will be able to control them flawlessly.



The jumpers control several options for each channel (there are two channels A/B), you can set fan block detection, analogue/PWM (pulse width modulation) power, and the different configurations on how to fan should speed up/down.

The block mechanism relies on the RPM signal, if the fan slows down and halts at a certain voltage; let’s say 3v, than the miniNG will gradually start to increase the voltage until the fan starts to spin again. Now what happens if you have a fan that doesn’t start spinning at 5v but when you first power it on at 12v and turn it back to 5v it continues to work? The miniNG solves this dilemma by giving a short burst at 12v at first power-on.

PWM or analogue? The T-Balancer XL had PWM power output which allowed fans to run at very low speeds without halting, this is made possible by the PWM technology which delivers small burst of 12v at different intervals, if you slow down the bursts the fan spins slower, if the bursts follow each other up quicker the fan speeds up, so far so good. However some fans don’t like PWM very much, causing irritating motor noise and generally being more obtrusive at 5% speed with PWM compared to 50% with analogue power. The T-Balancer XL allowed the frequency of the Pulse to be changed this tweaking helped for some fans making them quieter; the miniNG doesn’t have this tweak but does allow you to run the fan with analogue power, which doesn’t have any of the motor-noise related issues.

With analogue power the fan speed can not be reduced as drastically as with PWM but it’s not too bad either, most fans will be quite happy with 5v and they are silent at this setting.

Ad hoc test setup of the miniNG and T-Balancer XL

The small rheobus dial comes into play when you start configuring how the fan should spin up/down, each of the two fan channels can be configured individually, in its most basic configuration the dial works like any old fan controller, nothing too interesting here. A second configuration is to set a target temperature and using the temp probe readout, the fan will try to keep the temperature at the target temperature dynamically spinning faster/slower. A third method is fan speed control through a curve, the rheobus controls the maximum temperature, the curve starts at 0% fan speed at goes to 100% at the temperature you configured, default it’s at 70°C.

While the previous 3 methods are okay, they are not nearly as useful or interesting as the fourth one; it’s an altered curve setting which starts the fan speed at 30% making it less likely that the fan will stall at the lower part of the curve. So that pretty much sums up the miniNG if you hook it up in a stand alone configuration; the altered curve with fan anti-block and analogue power enabled proves to be an excellent method of giving your fan a brain so it knows how to react when there’s a change in system/component temperature.

For ~€40 it’s not the cheapest of solutions, with ordinary 4-way fan controllers costing only €10 you’ll have to spend quite a premium for this little wonder; however its extra functionality and hands-free (after configuration) utilization does make it infinitely more worthy than any old fan controller. The miniNG comes heartily recommended.

But wait, there’s more! If you are the lucky owner of a T-Balancer XL you can get extra functionality from the miniNG, hooking it up to the XL you can control the unit through software the same way as you would with the jumpers. But it goes further than that, you can alter the curve and set it to you likings and then store this new curve into the flash memory of the miniNG. Through the software you can switch between PWM/Analogue power on the fly and also set alarm temperatures accurately.

Below you can see a small movie recorded of how the altered curve works, red dotted line is the current temperature from the temp probe, pinching the probe between my fingers the temperature and fan speed increases immediately.



In the second small movie I blocked the fan’s blades and you can see how the miniNG starts increasing the voltage.



The cooperation with the T-Balancer XL is more than just the icing on the cake, the miniNG really shows it tiny little muscles when hooked up, it’s like an ant, very strong when working alone with even more impressive results when working in team.

The miniNG is available directly from mCubed for €39 by following this link. I like to thank Florian from mCubed for sending over the test unit.More information about their other products here.

Question/Comments: forum thread