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FeelingPC Ice Hole
Author: Mike Kitchenman
Date Posted: April 16th, 2002
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| Bottom Line: Shinier, Prettier and quieter. What more do you need out of a cooling fan? |
Pages: 1 2 3 4
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Introduction
A fan has 3 major parts to note: (for my purposes)
The outer case
The blades
The inner hub
The case is the case, not much to note there. However, the blades and the hub do matter. The area the blades cover directly tie in to how much air they can move. This means that the size of the central hub also directly affects this. The larger the hub, the less airflow you can have. And if you look at fans between 50 and 80mm, the hub size doesn't change that much, meaning that the hub size is about as small as they can make it now. So, an 80mm fan would obviously be a lot more efficient at cooling than a 60, right? Generally, yes, however you've gotta get the airflow from that 80mm fan onto a heatsink designed for a 60mm fan.
This is where the cool folks over at Feeling PC rolled onto the scene. They designed a clear plastic 60 to 80mm fan adapter they call the Ice Hole. But they proceeded to go a bit beyond the call of duty and decided to make it cool looking too. Sporting 3 LEDs onboard, along with controls for them as well as fan speed control, this is one really tricked out toy. How's it work? Lets find out.
Design/Construction
Well, the Ice Hole is a pretty nifty design in and of itself (and quite unique, I might add.) The unit itself is constructed out of clear plastic material, could be plexi, lexan, or something, I don't know, but it looks pretty slick.
At one end of the unit, you find all of the controls that you could possibly need for a fan adapter. There are 3 dipswitches, which give you 4 possible fan speed settings; low, medium, medium/normal, and normal. And on the other side of the back you have 3 dipswitches that control the integrated LEDs. Yeah, the built lights into this thing. Red Green and Blue.
Oh, for those of you wondering about the colors:
Yeah, it's really pretty. Well, anyways, enough of my drooling, time to look at some more technical aspects of the design. Right behind each set of switches you see a 3pin male connector, just like on your motherboard. This is how everything is powered and controlled. The one behind the fan speed switches is where you plus the 80mm fan into, and the other one is used to power the unit and the fan.
Then you also get all the mounting screws. Which they provide in BULK with the unit, for mounting anything from a 10mm thick 80, to your normal 25mm thick models, and even the beastly Delta 38mm thick things. There are also a number of screw variants for connecting the Ice Hole to different heat sinks. Granted, this means that if your HSF doesn't use screws to hold the fan down, you're SOL. If your cooler has clips or any other mounting mechanism, you can't use an Ice Hole. (Coolers like ThermalRight SK6, Globalwin FOP series, and a number of others.)
The last parts are the connecting cables. They give you 2 cables to use, one, which can go to a 3-pin connector on the motherboard, and one for a 4-pin PSU molex. This means you can power it from either source. Mind you, if you're using a high-powered 80, I'd still shy away from the motherboard connector, due to power draw issues.
Overall this is a pretty slick looking unit and the design is really nice. If I weren't changing heatsinks constantly, and I wanted a cool looking toy on my sink, this would be one of the coolest toys I've seen.
Design: 2/2
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