Phobya Touch 6 Fan Controller Review

Turning the Touch 6 on for the first time you are greeted with a mainly blank screen and a power button that needs to be pressed to turn the unit on.

With the power button pressed you can see you have six fans displayed along with a lock button on the far right next to the power button and a brightness button on the far left to adjust the brightness up or down. This brightness symbol disappears after six seconds if not used.

To begin to use the fan controls you must unlock it by pressing the padlock.

With it unlocked you can begin to change your fan speeds, you can use auto or manual modes. Auto modes wills set fan speeds depending on the temperature. In this mode you can adjust the fan speed by using the temperature parameter in the top right. By clicking the arrows on the right/left you can move the temperature parameter up/down in terms of the threshold that triggers a fan response. As we mentioned in the introduction this is a binary operation. You get to set “X” temperature to trigger “Y” response in fan speed %. Any temperature under X temperatures triggers Y% fan speed as a response, anything above X temperature triggers 100% fan speed. The factory default is X=45 degrees Celsius and Y=60% fan speed but you can adjust those to whatever you want. Each channel can have its own independent setting which is nice. The manual details how to do all of this a bit more clearly.

In manual mode you simply set a fixed fan speed based on whatever you want, the temperature probe displays the temperature for your information so you can decide which fan speed is best.

Performance

Screen Quality:  The panel is actually very good for a budget fan controller and the fact it has brightness adjustment for various brightness settings is a big positive. The viewing angles aren’t that amazing but you don’t exactly need an IPS panel to use a fan controller and it does a solid job. As far as I could tell there was no backlight bleeding, though the screen is a glossy screen which I don’t really like as it does produce some glare compared to what you’d get on a matte screen. However, your glare experiences will vary depending on the room’s lighting set up.

Usability: Being a touch screen it is relatively intuitive as to what you need to do to control what. The auto-locking mechanism can be a bit confusing at times so remembering to unlock the controls is important. However with it unlocked it is relatively straight forward. One thing I do need to point out is that the LCD’s touch inputs aren’t that great, the zone of registry for the buttons is often very narrow and sometimes inputs do not register at all. That said things are relatively straight forward and you can tune almost every part of the fan controller simply by a few touch inputs. The instruction manual details well just how simple all these changes are and so there isn’t really much else to say.

Fan Tuning: Fan tuning is very good as you can tune with 1% fan speed adjustments and you can set the meter to display voltages or RPMs. You can’t directly control voltage or RPM but you can virtually do it by adjusting the overall percentage one percentage point at a time. One thing that is worth noting is that most fans cannot start with low voltages, so anything below 5 volts is often a no-go. This is of course no fault of Phobya but something worth considering when picking your voltages. Finally their is actually some quite significant lag between speed changes and the speed dropping to that level, in some cases I had to wait around 10 seconds for the speed to come down to the correct level, raising the speed had less input-output lag. Voltage stability seemed good, having the fans on the controller running at 12 volts consistently for extended periods of time didn’t reveal any audible fan speed spikes, and in most cases any fluctuation is more likely to be from the fan than the fan controller anyway.

Build Quality: For such an affordable unit I was expecting a skimp out on quality and we do have that to some extent. The unit is mainly all plastic, though the front bezel is brushed aluminium which is excellent to see while the frame is totally plastic. Though the frame is big enough to offer structural rigidity and the sides of the fan controller do not flex at all. The PCB unit is very well built too and the soldering looks high quality though the fan inputs haven’t been glued down very straight which does look a bit silly and shows a little slip in attention-to-detail. The blue PCB is kind of disappointing as I wanted to see black but it is quite a dark blue and would be barely visible inside most cases. Like I already mentioned with the screen it is generally good quality but glare is a marginal issue due to the choice of a glossy panel. I also mentioned earlier that the sleeving was very good quality too but I did have a slight concern in that the sleeving isn’t “secured” so when you pull on the cables the sleeving moves up and down the cable and can bunch up in the middle, it is easy to move back but this could of been prevented by using the heat shrink at the ends of the cables to hold the sleeving into position. Also worth noting is that big cases may  find the 60cm cables are not long enough. A handful (maybe 2 or 3) of fan and temperature sensor extension cables would of been nice. Finally the fan fail alarm/speaker  is actually implemented in a very good way because it has a jumper setting to turn it on or off which is nice because I have seen fan controllers malfunction in the past and having a jumper to override the alarm/speaker at a hardware level is a great idea.