What the hell is a Digidoc ?! It's one of those cool geeky gadgets that you don't really need, but for a change it is actually quite useful. Kind of like a space-age control panel for your PC, the Digidoc 5 allows you to:
• Monitor up to eight different fans RPM.
• Take on-the-fly temperature readings from up to eight different sources within your pc including CPUs, graphics cards and case ambient.
• Monitors +5 and +12 system voltage
• Make your PC look seriously cool
All readings are available via an extremely smart LCD display panel, which glows orange. Since the temperature is monitored and updated every 4 seconds, it provides just about the most up to date information possible. The Digital Doc 5.0 Costs £52 from Tekheads.
Box
The Digidoc comes in this rather mundane looking plastic vacuum pack. When you are paying $50 for a piece of equipment it's nice to get a proper box! A minor point, but I am a sucker for pretty pictures. In this box you get:
- The Digidoc itself
- 8 thermal sensors (two flat and six bulb)
- 8 pieces of thermal tape
- Mounting screws
- Instructions on a CD-ROM
Installation
Installing the Digidoc is as easy as installing a CD-ROM drive, or any other 5 1/2" device. You simply remove the case bevel and screw it in. The Digidoc also doubles up as a hard drive cooler, since it has the holes to screw in a 3 1/2" device and has a little fan. Since my Athlon PC already has a built in thermal sensor (and a thermal probe), my aging Pentium III 1GHz system (based on a BX board with no thermal diode) was the ideal computer to install the Digidoc in. As you can see it sure looks cool mounted in the case!
As mentioned before, the Digidoc box contains two types of thermal sensor, the flat variety and the bulb variety. The flat kind is ideal for installing under CPU heat sinks (not between the die and the cooler but next to it!) and provides the most accurate temperature readings possible. This kind of probe are used in our cooler reviews since it is much more reliable than the built in temperature sensor of most AMD compatible boards. Note that Pentium III based motherboards read the CPU temperature directly from the diode which is built into the chip itself, i.e. the resulting readings are spot-on. Unfortunately my BX board does not support this advanced feature. But I guess the Digidoc can make up for that .
The bulb variety of sensors can be used for a variety of purposes, including hard drives, placement between cooler fins or just left "naked" to measure the case ambient temperature.
In this box you get:
