[section_title title=Testing]
Testing
Assembling the Grid+ V2 was a simple affair, connect the power lead to a spare Molex plug and the USB cable to a USB header and then plug the fans in with or without the extension cables depending on how far they have to reach.
On turning on the computer however, I was greeted with a sight not familiar to me since the days of Windows Vista… USB Device Not Recognised! Diving straight into Device Manager there was the ‘it’s broken’ yellow icon in my USB devices, windows had no idea what I’d done but it didn’t like it and wouldn’t, or couldn’t, fix it. Something not widely known about the review industry is that we often send each other samples after we have used them. For this reason, faults can arise a little more frequently and so we don’t mark down for faulty components. After all, if you were to receive a faulty part you would just get a replacement from the store and carry on as if nothing had happened and so we follow that same principle.
As I mentioned earlier, the connected fans are controlled by NZXT’s CAM software which is available to anyone and can give you insights into your computer. I won’t deal with the entire software suite, but I’ll go over parts of it as there are some additions.
The first thing I did after installing CAM was used it to install the Grid+ drivers and restart the PC but again the device wasn’t recognised. It took a bit of back and forth but I finally got the Grid+ working.
The Grid+ software component bolts on as a sort of modular extension to the basic CAM software which is why I’ll be focusing on that part here. On the Dashboard tab, you have the additional control to select individual fan channels from 1-6 and you can make changes to the speed of the fan you have selected; you can choose between preset profiles, either the default options or ones you have made yourself. Also displayed is the Grid+ V2 power usage and the fan speed for the selected fan (or a pair of fans if you are using the splitter).
Choosing the GRID+ tab will get you the main control window where you can see each channel’s fan curve and it’s also where you program in your custom profiles. You can also select whether you want the fan curve to read from the CPU or GPU temperatures so that specific fans ramp up when only that component is being pushed instead of having all the fans running faster, saving electricity as well as reducing noise and wear.
