Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

I've had the Commander Pro for about 24 hours. It's had some ups and downs, but mostly up. Starting with the good, the Commander Pro greatly simplified my cabling. I've long been a stickler for very clean cable management. Before using the Commander, I had two separate Silverstone fan hubs (one for intake fans and another for exhaust), so each had a PWM cable going to the motherboard and a SATA power cable. That is to say that, in addition to the 6 cables for my 6 case fans, we had 4 extra cables (two PWM, two power). This was a necessity because on basic PWM hubs you can't set fan speeds individually. Basic hubs like that can only be set as an entire unit. Commander Pro, with Link, can set fan speeds individually, so I didn't need two hubs. Consequently, both PWM cables went away, replaced by a single internal USB cable, and two power cables turned into one. Getting to Link (the software management system), it's earned a really, really bad reputation. This was my first experience with Link and I went in as blind as I possibly could to keep from having preconceived biases. I did have some trouble with Link, but nowhere near what has been described to me. I'll get to the problems and how I fixed them later. Once Link was actually working, it was great. It's too complex to get into here (I have attached a photo that may help you understand), but I loved the ability to visually organize fans and to give any of them a preset profile or a custom profile, one by one. The BIG feature for me, however, was being able to set case fans to respond to GPU temperatures, something my motherboard (Crosshair VI Hero) couldn't do. The bottom two intakes are now responsive to the GPU, staying silent when the GPU is inactive. This feature will be more useful on a gaming computer that uses an open air aftermarket cooler on their GPU, like the the EVGA FTW for instance. Those cards can basically turn a small case into an oven, so you could conceivably program the Commander Pro to turn on otherwise unused exhaust fans as the GPU temperature rises. Initially, Link/Commander Pro was rough, however. While Link was mostly stable, it failed to change fan speeds on any sort of curve. By default, fans seemed to be stuck at 50% or roughly 700 RPM (just my guess as to how it arrived at that RPM). I could change static RPM/% and the fans would respond, and the temperatures were displayed correctly, so it was a very odd problem. At this point, I tried to update Link, and it turned out (predictably) that I had the latest version of Link. I was ready to quit updating there, but it turns out there's a separate firmware update elsewhere. I found it and, despite the device only having been released three days ago, it did have a firmware update. This was a big improvement and allowed me to set fan curves, but Link would not go under 50% no matter what percent I set the relevant curve to. Roughly 700 RPM was the floor, although the fans would correctly respond when the curve told them to go above that. Weirdly enough, small, incremental decreases in fan RPM did work, and I was able to drop fan speeds by 100 RPM increments in the curve successfully, all the way down to 0 RPM/off. I was worried that this solution would be very tenuous, but it has remained effective after several restarts, so hopefully it's working fine now. I'm very satisfied with it at this point. There are areas to improve, however, that aren't flaws. First off, this is the "Commander Pro," presumably a device aimed at professionals (workstations etc.), but it's also got RGB/LED capabilities, which seems aimed at gamers. I'm sure that's welcome for most users, but my computers are 98% for work and have no aesthetic LEDs. Having additional features is certainly nothing to complain about, but I feel they come at the expense of more fan slots. Current my CPU fans are powered/controlled by the motherboard, which is perfectly fine with the Crosshair's superb PWM controls, but conceivably a large case, or a case with a big rad in push pull for instance, it would be easy to run out. I'd much rather have 8 fan headers or ideally 10 even if it came at the cost of RGB functionality, at least when it comes to "Pro" models. Maybe this "Pro" model should have a more gamer-friendly name and a strict workstation-esque model could be released that got rid of the fun stuff. Anyway, despite a lot of trouble setting it up, I'm happy with the Commander Pro and, for the moment, I recommend it, Link and all. I'll update this if I run into any new crippling problems. As it stands, I can only give it four stars due to the Link issues, but maybe my trouble shooting will help others.