Installation and Operation:
The physical installation of the FP-01 is simple in terms of getting it mounted in a case. The four screws it comes with should allow it to work on most cases with a free 5.25" bay, and to my delight it worked just fine with a few different tool-less cases. The test installation was completed in a Thermaltake Armor case, and the "swing down" latch on the tool-less mechanism was able to catch one screw hole on the FP-01 and hold it tightly.
The next step proved to be much more time consuming, although not particularly difficult... making all the connections. While you could quite possibly do this task quickly, routing all the cables to make the presentation neat is what will take a while, as there are just so many wires to deal with.
With the physical installation completed, there is the matter of installing the card reader driver and application. While the application, called "C-Media Card Manager", seemed like a clone of Windows Explorer and wasn't particularly necessary to me, it installed at the same time as the driver that enabled the one click copy function. After a bit of testing I was impressed with the convenience of being able to copy an entire multimedia card to the Window's desktop without even looking at the computer screen. One thing to note on this process is that you can only have one card installed at a time to have the copy button be functional.
One reason to leave the application installed is that it adds helpful icons to the Windows Explorer display of the drive letters assigned to the card reader. While I have been confused many times in the past by card readers that just throw a bunch of letters onto the list, this one actually identify what format card goes with each letter!
Although my photos may be even worse than usual in this next step, what you can hopefully see is the FP-01 in action. The display is laid out very nicely, and the text and graphics are crisp and easy to understand (whether the two images below relay that or not). You can use the Mode button to quickly scroll through the three temperatures and fan speeds, and use the +/- keys to adjust the speeds on the fly. A high alarm can be set for each temperature, and a low alarm can be set for each fan speed, which will alert you to a "CAUTION" situation with an audible alarm and a flashing red indicator on the screen. In addition, the screen shows you what type of card is installed in the reader, just in case you couldn't look down that extra inch or so to see for yourself.
 
The bulk of the functions on the Aerocool FP-01 worked perfectly, and I was extremely pleased with how well it worked and how well it looked in my system. But, one key item did not provide reliable operation and really made it difficult to trust the device. While the relative speed of fans could always be well regulated by the controller, the absolute value displayed on the screen was no where close to right.
What I mean by the previous sentence is that full speed is represented by 7 hash marks on the screen just below the numerical value, and the lowest speed is represented by 1 hash mark. I could check the speeds by sound or by software based monitors and see that each click up or down on the FP-01 corresponded to an appropriate change in speed. Just looking at the display to show 7, 6, or 5 hash marks was a very reliable means for me to know how fast a fan was spinning.
But, I learned that the number indicated on the display was not always to be trusted, and on 3 out of 5 fans tested I got numbers (or a lack of numbers) that told me something was wrong. The two photos above are taken with the same fan connected to channel 3 of the fan speed controller. This is a small Sunon magnetic levitation fan on the chipset of an ASUS K8N-DL motherboard, rated for 5600 RPM. Note that the image on the right shows 7 hash marks, but a speed of 560 RPM (1/10 the true value). Now note that the image on the left shows 5 hash marks, but a speed of 8580 RPM! Even if the value of 560 RPM was to be accepted, going down two steps should not increase the speed. While the fan was functioning perfectly, the data being displayed was way off.
This issue was duplicated on a pair of 92mm Panaflo H1A-Z fans rated at 2850 RPM. The problem became more troublesome on these fans (installed on the CPU coolers for this Dual Opteron system), when the display would actually register a "--", as if to indicate no fan speed at all, despite them both running at close to full speed. This not only creates an issue with trusting the device, but eliminates the possibility of setting a fan speed alarm, as you don't know if it will arbitrarily dip below your set value, or indicate a full stop.
After trying the fans on different channels, with different cables, and with the Y cable connected in different configurations, I realize there was no fix present for this problem. While a Noctua 120mm fan and a Cooler Master 80mm fan worked just perfectly, the three fans I wanted to control could not be.
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