BitFenix Recon Fan Controller

Without power to the Recon, you can get a sense of the areas that are touch sensitive, but the lighter shaped that can be seen through the screen at this time. Other than the screen, what you see on the front is a thin bezel with BitFenix and Recon painted on it.

There is a steel plate that supports the touch screen and PCB, and it is bent on both sides and ends with tabs like this. Depending on the depth of the bezel on the chassis, there are three depths to choose from when installing the Recon.

The left half of the unit has connections for the 4-pin Molex for power that is 24" long, and three of the five fan headers, all of which are also 24" long. You then hit the ribbon cable of five temperature probes which is 26" long, the other two fan cables, and the USB 2.0 lead that is 26" long, and then it piggy packs into another USB 2.0 connection on 26" more of wire.

Getting most of the wiring out of view you can see a bit of what goes on back here. There are the large heatsinks for each of the five channels along with a few things you don't typically see on a fan controller.

On the left side of the back of the controller there is a jumble of capacitors and two of the five fan headers at the top. The eighteen legged chip here has no naming on it, but is the controller chip for the basic functions of the Recon.

The larger chip in the last image controls the functionality of the device. Whereas this ELAN chip allows devices to connect to it via USB along with what I believe to be the onboard memory for storing profiles through the software of sorts.

On the right are three fan connections and the power connections at the top. On the far right is the speaker/buzzer that will sound if an alarm is triggered. The rest of the room is taken by resistors and the trio of glued on heat sinks for these three fan channels.

The magic begins when you power on the Recon and see the screen come to life. I am in manual mode playing around with things, but you can see the ambient temperature of 35°C under the lights, the current RPM of the fan, what channel of the five I am programming and the fan indicator in stopped motion showing the fan is spinning, along with the alarm and power buttons.