Installation

Installing the Commander ESA Edition is straight forward. Treat it like an optical drive and slide it into the front of the case. You should however, connect all the cables before installing it, as the connectors will be fairly hard to reach. It would have been nice if these could have been angled toward the back, not upward.

Use with ESA

There is no CD included with the Silverstone Commander. To use the unit, simply download the nTune System Monitor from NVIDIA and install it in Windows XP or Vista. As mentioned before, you will need an NVIDIA mainboard to gain access to the ESA functionality. The nTune System Monitor in it's maximized view, uses a full 3D interface (in other words: it uses the 3D capability of the GPU to render) to give you an overview of the system. The above image is without the Commander installed. This is what you will see when you have the necessary mainboard.


As soon as the Silverstone Commander is installed, a new symbol is visible within the nForce System Monitor. A (not very modern looking) case icon is now present. It gives you access to up to four fans and the four temperature diodes. The labels also read "Silverstone". You can easily control the speed of the fans, but connecting CCFL lights do not trigger any additional functionality within the nTunes System Monitor. All the Molex connectors are there for, is to supply power to up to three of such lighting accents. The upside of this is a better cable management and that you will not require more than a single Molex connector, to power all three lights.

So you may wonder, what's the use of the Commander? It has the same purpose of any other fan controller/monitoring device out on the market. Instead of using proprietary software or an external display, you can easily configure everything through the given software interface from NVIDIA. This places all the monitoring aspects of a system (CPU, GPU, Memory, HDD, Case, PSU) under one hood.