Jetart Xpanel DT5000 :: Description and Useage

It's been a while since I've dealt with a temperature sensor display that was attached to the PC and not on my Desktop, so I was very interested to see how this Xpanel DT5000 from Jetart would perform. The box itself, as shown in the picture at the beginning of this review, shows you the feature set and specifications as I've listed them above. Inside the box are the Xpanel DT5000, the manual and the required accessories.

As you can see from the feature list and the first picture above, the DT5000 has two USB ports, a FireWire/1394 port, a headphone and a microphone port, a blue backlit digital readout and a "digital Control Knob". Inside the accessory bag are a USB, FireWire/1394 and headphone/microphone adapter wires; three fan power extension connectors, three thermal sensor wires (going into one connector) with three pieces of thermal tape and a pack of four screws.

After laying everything out, I opened up the manual to see how this all goes together.

I give proper kudos to the pictures and diagrams in the manual, as they are precise and accurate. Even if you don't actually read the manual, you'll be able to figure out what goes where as everything is labeled very nicely.

Turning the unit over, we see one of the other functions the DT5000 has.

The fan shown is to cool a hard drive if you so desire to use the unit for that.

Inside the unit is a Y.S. Tech 70mm fan for hard drive cooling and all of the sensor and fan connections. While it does have the listed three fan speed connectors, one of them is used right away for the HDD cooling fan. If you are not wanting to monitor that fan for some reason, you would have to remove it from the speed/power connector on the panel and use another power source to run it. The fan itself, which is listed to go from 2600 RPM to 4300 RPM, can actually be reduced to 2300 RPM. I found that not only was the HDD fan very quiet at that speed, but it still did a very good job of keeping the SATA drive I had in there cooled down.

Once you've decided what accessories, fans and sensors you want to use and have them hooked up to the connectors inside the unit, you slide the top back on, which clicks into place with two tabs.

Place it inside any available 5.25" space in your case and hook it up to the power supply. Now comes a fun bit, if you've decided to use the temperature sensors. The unit comes with three sensors that are labeled 1, 2 and 3 and the cables for them are plenty long enough, so you can get the temps from practically anything inside most any case. For this review I chose the CPU, the North Bridge and the hard drive. Luckily, I am in the middle of a new build for a client, and used their new system to test out the DT5000. The CPU sensor (number 1) went onto the Intel 3.06 GHz Celeron just under the CPU holding clamp.

The number 3 sensor I placed directly between the North Bridge and it's heatsink.

Sensor number two I attached to the hard drive. For the fan speed controls, I left the HDD fan hooked up as it came, and added the case fan to a second controller. I also went ahead and hooked up the included USB and headphone/microphone connectors. I didn't bother with the FireWire/1394, as the motherboard I was using doesn't have it. Here's where I ran into my first complaint. The USB, Firewire and audio connectors can only be hooked up to the back of the motherboard. None of them had the ability to be attached straight to the interior of the motherboard. This means that you will have to use a PCI slot on your case to have these wires connected. Here are a couple of pictures to show you what I mean.

Not really sure why Jetart didn't have these cables set up to connect straight to the motherboard inside the case instead of having to route them outside the case. While for me it was not a huge deal as this is a new build and I am not using any PCI slots this time around, I know that depending on your motherboard and the case you have, this may be an issue.

Once I got all of the wires connected, I turned on the PC and was rewarded with a very nice blue glowing readout. Controlling what you see on the readout and the fan speeds and other adjustments is done with the Digital Control Knob.

The control knob can be either turned or pushed. Right in between the knob and the display, is a small hole with the degree symbol and the letters C and F. By poking a paper clip or something similar, you can change the display to read in either Celsius or Fahrenheit. By pushing the control knob, you change which set of controls you are dealing with. Your choices are T1-F1, T2-F2, and T3-F3. It starts off with T1-F1, which shows the temperature reading for sensor 1 and the fan speed of fan 1. By turning the knob, you can now adjust the fan speed. If you press the knob in and hold it a moment, you get to another screen for the first set of sensors and from here you will see the temperature flashing at 60° C. You can now adjust at what temperature the beeping alarm goes off. Yes, the Xpanel DT5000 comes with a rather loud beeping alarm for both temps and fan speeds. Once you set the temp alarm, push the knob quickly and it will stay on that screen, but it will now allow you to adjust whether or not the low fan speed alarm is engaged. The low fan speed is permanently set at 1000 RPM, so if you are using a really slow fan, I'd not set up that alarm. Here is what the three sets of readouts look like.

As you can see, the LCD is very easy to read with nice large numbers. Here's what it looks like installed in the case. I chose to put it in the top slot, and one thing to keep in mind is to have an open slot right below it so the HDD fan can do its job better.

Once I got it all set up, I then ran some tests using Sisoft SANDRA Burn-in to stress out the system and see how accurate the readouts were. To gauge the accuracy, I used SpeedFan for temperature and fan speed and compared the two. I found that the temps were within 2° C of each other, which shows me that the DT5000 has a fairly accurate temp sensor. The fan speeds were, as expected, right on the money. I plugged in a couple of different USB devices I have into the front USB ports and they came up in XP immediately and were properly identified. I then threw in one of my favorite CDs, called up Windows Media Player and plugged my Jensen headphones into the appropriate front headphone port and had excellent sound coming from it.