I purchased the "KSGER STM32 2.1S" variety of this with the "alloy handle" myself because I guess I have some sort of passion for collecting soldering irons. This is the 7th soldering iron I've owned in my lifetime and the 3rd T12 style in the past 4 years. The first one (~$15 kit) was pure garbage, the second (~$40 with integrated power supply) is pretty decent but I've really gotta crank the temps to solder ground plane and power stuff (from 300C to like 370C). This third T12 version I've had for a few days and soldered for 4 or 5 hours and it is definitely the best so far. The large OLED has a lot of info on it, updates quickly, and the menus are pretty easy to get around in once you figure out tricks like press-and-turn is its own thing.
I bought it with the intention of replacing the stock firmware on it immediately, however the stock firmware seems to do it all so I am not sure if I will. It has support for like 100 different tips you can turn individually on and off. There are configurable timeouts for standby (setback to lower temp), sleep (disabling the iron), and screen saver (which floats the mode and current temp around the screen to use all the OLED pixels evenly). It has a RTC with a battery too, and although I am not sure why it needs a clock, but I was delighted to find out that Tuesday is "Thes" so that's what I'll call it from now on. The setback/standby timer can go as low as 1 minute and has SHAKE, SWITCH, MANUAL, AUTO, and OFF modes. When it is about to enter standby it chirps about once a second, then twice a second then a longer beep as it enters standby. It also beeps when it comes back up to temp after leaving standby. Too much beeping for me because I'd prefer it go into standby every time I put it in the stand, but luckily you can turn the beeper off completely.
The aluminum handle is pretty good. The only PRO really is that my hand is about 1cm closer to what I am working on and the little rubber grippy doesn't slide around on me, but the CON side is that the handle does get warmer. I did about an hour of 350C soldering and the handle got up to 37C and is hottest where you hold it. It never feels uncomfortably hot, being basically my body's temperature anyway, but my hand definitely was sweatier and grabbing the iron out of the holder it felt a little strange to be so warm. The shake senor is pretty sensitive so there hasn't been an issue with it entering standby while I'm holding it, even with a 1 minute standby delay. There was a KSGER sticker on it that came off pretty quickly to reveal "100MHz Soldering" etched under the sticker. I see on alliexpress that they don't even show this silver handle variety any more so :mep:. The one problem I had was it is so thin it just falls through my stand (and ended up melting my vacuum hose I use for hand SMD pick and place). I 3D printed a small collar that locks into the notches on the handle. It is PLA but hasn't deformed due to the heat at all yet.
One strange thing is that it takes about 6-7 seconds after you flip the power switch for it to turn on. I didn't grab the multimeter to see if this is all delay in the power supply startup, although I wish I had before I put it back together again last time. Once it is on, it heats to 300C in about 5 seconds, pulling over 70W at the wall to do so. Also bad, the tip temperature drops pretty hard when working on high thermal mass components and the output stays around 25% when doing so, so there's definitely room for improvement. Also, when hot swapping tips, the PID control is all over the place for the first 20 seconds and will continue to go bonkers until it really settles on the temperature so it is best to wait for it to stabilize before setting off.
Finally, as bd139 just pointed out, soldering the mains connector directly to the PCB definitely stresses the board from the power cord stress of plugging, unplugging, or dragging around the workbench.
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