Fractal Design Adjust 108 Fan Controller Review

Installation of the Adjust 108 was a breeze, it clipped into the front of my chassis with ease and the extra length of the cables meant that hooking up all the fans within my chassis was quick and painless. From taking the controller out of the box to having it installed and wired into my system was a ten minute process and since the cables are clearly numbered it was easy to keep track of which cable goes where within my system.

With installation out of the way, we can talk about performance and that is something that is a little subjective when it comes to a fan controller as it’s more an indirect cooling device to control the direct cooling devices – the fans. It has one purpose to fulfil and that is to do exactly what it says on the tin, control the speed of my fans and that’s exactly what it does.

The sliders all feel of a really good quality and having control of a massive 36W per channel gives me room to power even the most power hungry fans on the market, this could be useful for those that plan to fit more than one fan per channel, very handy if you have a fan / radiator set that you wish to keep on one channel of the controller, or if you just have more than 6 fans to keep in check.

Powering up the system the Adjust 108 gives the fans a full power “kick”, as typically some fans will not start at low RPM / Voltage settings, so the 108 fires up for a second or two at full power before dropping to your pre-set speed. The controller gives you a range of 5V to 12V, which is a standard range for most fans on the market and more than enough power to create a hurricane inside your system should you wish.

With all the fans dialled up to maximum my PC sounded like it was about to take off, but that is what happens when you drive half a dozen 140mm fans at their maximum power output, sure enough though my internal system temperatures took a nose dive, but the noise level was simply unacceptable, to no fault of the Adjust 108 I might add, it did exactly what it should have, powered my fans with all its might. Dropping things down to a more favourable level was easy enough to and it doesn’t take long to dial in the optimum balance of airflow vs noise for each fan in your system. Should you need to however you can always drop them all to 5V and keep noise to a minimum, perfect for kicking back and watching a movie with minimum background noise.