BitFenix Hydra Pro Fan Controller Review
Peter Donnell / 12 years ago
It only took about 10mins to installed the Hydra, thanks to its well labelled cables and 5.25″ compatibility and with the device installed in our BitFenix Prodigy, we can see that the black soft-touch finish and detailing on the Hydra Pro really sets off the black and white contrast of this chassis, in short, it looks fantastic. Performance wise the controller operates exactly as you would expect, allowing you to adjust the speed of your fans with a simple slider. We had our CPU fan connected to the left most slider and a further 4 fans connected to the remaining jumpers, including a 200mm LED fan on the 2nd jumper. With the fan controls turned up to maximum the system was essentially generating its own hurricane and the airflow pulling through the chassis was immense, but of course the trade off here was noise, the system also sounded like a hurricane.
With all the sliders down to the bottom we saw our chassis fans drop down to as low as 300RPM meaning the system was whisper quiet, we were unable to stop the fans completely but and such a low speed the system because almost silent thanks to the fan controller. As you can see on the far left there is also a small button, pressing this turned on/off our LED lights on the 200mm fan, the only thing we did notice was that as we increase or decrease the fan speed, the brightness of the LED was also effected, not really an issue though as this was a feature I actually liked, slow RPM and dim lights and high RPM and a brighter light seemed to make sense to me.