A funky little cooling fan with rotating LED text to give the inside of
your case that little bit extra geek/cool factor, and seriously, can you ever have too many lights? Well... yeah maybe you can.
The Thermaltake iFlash Mini is a standard 8cm case fan that will mount into any 8cm fan spot, such as the back or side of your case. However it’s not just a standard boring case fan, The iFlash also has two little ‘wings’ that spin along with the fan blades, and on these wings are a series of LEDs that (when spinning) flash rapidly to produce text. Not a new or particularly amazing concept, you may have seen spinning tops and other devices with LEDs that will display patterns when being spun around, we just thought this would be cool to have inside your PC.
The only text the iFlash displays is “Thermaltake XX*C” where “XX” is the current temperature of the air flowing through it in degrees Celsius. So it’s not just worthless eye candy, it does actually serve a small purpose, the only downside is that the text is only viewable from inside the computer case, so you’d want to have a window on your PC, otherwise you’ll only see a dull red and blue glow from the other side.
We ran the iFlash in front of a normal fan heater to see what temperature it could measure up to and it got all the way up to 70 degrees Celsius before changing the text to simply read “HIGH” instead, so it’s certainly capably to report on any temperature a PC case is likely to get up to.
Sadly nothing to do with the text being displayed can be changed by the user, so you’re stuck with the standard Thermaltake propaganda (thank you, I needed constant reminders that it’s a Thermaltake product) and the temperature display.
We’ve done a short video below to demonstrate the different patterns the fan displays, as it was a bit hard to demonstrate with just photos.
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The fan operates at 2,000rpm (fixed speed) at a claimed noise level of 21dBA, so it’s not the quietest fan on the market, but it’s certainly not going to blow out your eardrums. The fan is powered by a standard 3-pin fan connector which connects to your motherboard (no Molex adapter is included) is only a sleeve bearing fan instead of the more durable and longer lasting ball bearing type, and moves a rather poor 19cfm of air, which is below average for a fan of this size at 2,000rpm, so it really is for looks more than anything else
Conclusion:
Retailing online for AU$23, it’s not cheap, and could really do with a few more features to be more worthwhile (such as ability to change the text) and could certainly perform better, but for that little bit something extra inside your display case, one of these will do nicely.
OzHardware Rating – 5/10
This product can be purchased online at http://www.techbuy.com.au/ (Direct Link)
