Verdict: The bigNG certainly isn't a plug and play device and, unlike many of its cheaper rivals, doesn't give you direct, physical control of your fans via dials, but its complex software allows for much greater control over your PC's cooling. It's a steep learning curve that requires time, but the bigNG's fan control abilities offer the potential for exceptional tranquillity. If you value quiet computing then once you've tried the bigNG, you won't want to go back.
The mCubed T-Balancer bigNG aims to offer a little more than most fan controllers. Rather than having to tweak dials on the front of your computer whenever you need extra cooling, the bigNG allows you to create a fully automated cooling system, automatically increasing and decreasing fan speeds depending on localised temperature changes inside your case. Once you've configured and calibrated the system, therefore, you shouldn't need to worry about whether your hardware is too hot.
Unlike most fan controllers, which simply adjust the voltage of the fans to control their speed, the bigNG uses a more impressive-sounding technique called Pulse Width Modulation (PWM) to control fan speed. Lowering a fan's voltage is the traditional way to reduce its speed, but this can cause it to stall. PWM gets around this by sending pulses of electricity rather than a constant stream of power. These pulses are at the full 12V, so the fan has all the power it needs, but can still be slowed down. Even better, the T-Balancer uses high-frequency PWM, which avoids the strange fan motor noises that can be a feature of low-frequency PWM. This is why systems run by the bigNG, such as the 2006 Dream PC, the Vadim Cepheus (see Issue 37, p80) can be so quiet. However, this technique creates a lot of excess heat, hence the need for a passive heatsink on the bigNG's main chip.
The bigNG version is the most flexible version of the T-Balancer series that you can buy, as it has three different mounting methods. The main card, a 87mm x 87mm PCB, has all the fittings for placing in a 3.5in drive bay, a motherboard expansion slot, or stuck anywhere on your case, internally or externally, using the two supplied strips of Velcro. Two sheets of transparent acrylic are used to encase and protect the PCB if you choose this option.
The bigNG has plugs for up to four fans, but you can use fan cable splitters to attach multiple fans to each power socket - the Cepheus, for example, uses the bigNG to tame its 12 fans, and watching them spin up gradually and silently when the system is put under load was an impressive sight.
If you're a beginner then wherever you locate the bigNG, you're in for a mystifying first few minutes. There are four analogue thermal sensors and two digital thermal sensors in the box, as well as fan signal cables that are designed to plug into your motherboard's fan headers to supply it with information about the fans. The manual is quite vague about the intended purpose of each cable, and assumes from the outset that you know what a 'tacho signal cable' or 'digital sensor' is, so there's plenty of room for improvement in terms of user-friendliness. Plus, the example card diagram in the manual isn't the same model as the bigNG, making it difficult to see exactly where each cable plugs into your card, and adding an unnecessary layer of complexity.
Digital thermal sensors are more precise than analogue sensors, and therefore should be placed in the areas where you want more accurate monitoring of heat levels inside your case. Precise monitoring is ideal for your CPU or GPU, and the analogue sensors are thinner and more flexible, so more suited to being squeezed into a small chipset heatsink and attached to the metal fins. This flexibility allows you to locate sensors at all the important hotspots inside your case, such as hard disks and motherboard VRMs. If you need more comprehensive protection, you can buy 'miniNG' controllers that act as extensions to the bigNG and provide additional fan mounts and sensors. The bigNG will also be useful in a water-cooled system, as it can control water pumps. Plus, other peripherals that can be bought for the bigNG include a flow meter and coolant temperature probes. As well as the sensors and fans, the bigNG needs connecting to a Molex for power, and to a USB port for feeding information to the software that controls it.
Once you have all the probes in place and the fans hooked up, you then need to run the supplied software. Setting up the system is fiddly and takes time, and learning how to configure the fans and calibrate the sensors can be confusing.
However, while it's complex, the software is extremely flexible, allowing you to calibrate the sensors individually and assign multiple sensors to a single fan, or vice versa.
