A Closer Look

The Sunbeam Rheobus Extreme comes in two colors: black (shown here) and silver. The front panel is aluminum with a clear acrylic cover attached over the aluminum. This is a six channel fan controller, so there are six knobs on the front. Each knob is made of clear plastic, allowing them to glow blue from the two small blue LEDs behind each knob, and the brightness of each changes based on the setting of the fan speed.


Each knob is labeled very subtly with gray lettering. There is a "HI" and "LO" mark for each, as well as a Roman numeral below each channel. The dials operate very smoothly from high to low, and there was not any scratching sometimes seen on other units. Each dial has two small dots on them to signify the dial's position.


The back of the Rheobus Extreme has all the connections for the power, both input and output. The controller is rated at 30 watts per channel, so there are huge heatsinks attached to each of the MOSFETs on the PCB. The design looks fairly simple, but there were some quality issues I noticed when looking at the circuit board. For one, the fan connectors along the back edge were all seated differently, and did not look very aesthetically pleasing. Granted, this is the back side of the unit, but it makes the unit look like it was made too quickly and without much care. The second thing I noticed was that some of the heatsinks seemed to wobble a bit when touched.


With the unit flipped over, the bottom of the circuit board is exposed. By looking at this side I found the reason for some of the heatsinks to be loose. There are twelve rectangular solder pads that are meant to hold the heatsinks in place. If you look at the lower right pad, you see it is completely missing. Some of the other pads were not holding the heatsinks all the way either.