While B450 boards are an even cheaper option, B550 and X570 motherboards have two major advantages: support for Ryzen 5000-series out of the box and support for PCIe Gen 4.0 storage and graphics cards. Having access to these adds a degree of future-proofing that you won't find on B450, in exchange for a slightly higher up-front cost. X570 boards tend to support a larger number of PCIe 4.0 devices simultaneously, but tend to cost more. If you plan to have a lot of fast PCIe 4.0 storage installed, then X570 makes sense; otherwise go for B550 as you'll get better value. You’ll get a new option that correlates with the chosen lighting channel so if you installed your fans on lighting channel 1, the new option would be Lighting Channel 1. How you connect the cable doesn’t matter as both ends of the cable have the same headers, and since you won’t be plugging anything else in the lighting node pro, we recommend that you connect the cable to the first channel. Take the three-pin cable that connects the lighting control hub and the lighting node pro and connect one end to the lighting control hub and the other to one of the channels in the lighting node pro.

For as much as I’ve written about case and cooling performance in my time, the fans included with most of the cases and radiators that find their way into the TR labs have been good enough that I’ve never felt any urge to consider premium aftermarket spinners. That’s become especially true as silicon process sizes have shrunk and chips have usually consumed less and less power to deliver a given level of performance. The slow-moving 120-mm and 140-mm fans in many modern cases move enough air quietly that only those with special needs really need to consider tearing out the included spinners from those enclosures.Every time I used either P12/14 or T30, at 800 to 1K rpm was more than enough for EK (PE and the new replacement P) also for Alphacool and their XT 45mm radiator. Maybe for radiators with higher fpi or 140mm based radiators (lower static pressure from fans). The problem with this is that it's possible to put the wrong cable on the wrong header. Certainly, they try to mitigate that but ... putting a 5V fan on a 12V header doesn't tend to end very well. The LL120 is the best fan for those who are looking for premium cooling performance and excellent RGB effects without sacrificing their noise levels. They come with over ten cooling effects and since their RPM is only up to 1500, they run quietly even at max load. – Features the commander can do lighting(2 ports) temp, usb hub(may or may not work) and pwm for fans. the 2 led ports need an hub to attach up to 6 fans to each port for a toalt of 12 fans.

The fans themselves feature two cables with one connecting to the motherboard or fan control unit and the other connecting to the RGB control unit. – Performance My PC will have 5 RGB ML120s, and some Corsair strip lights (probably 4 strips daisy chained together). I will for sure have a Commander Core, but exactly what other controllers do I need to control all of that with iCue? (fan speed and RGB) Also, both fans are aesthetically different. While the LL120s focus on looking pretty and providing cooler RGB lighting with more RGB lights on them, the magnetic levitation 120s are all about providing excellent airflow so they don’t have as many lights as the LL series. Corsair’s ML120 Pro RGB fans blend the purely practical innovation of magnetic-levitation bearings with a purely cosmetic augmentation: RGB LEDs. We’d normally expect a product to suffer for such vanity, but the ML120s defy expectations and lose nothing for their blinkenlights.

The idea is to design a system that will give you a reasonable degree of future-proofing and the ability to handle both gaming and content creation tasks, all for a reasonable price. This may be the first time we’ve ever reviewed fans in and of themselves at The Tech Report. That said, I have what I believe is a useful test method for gauging the performance of these spinners. It just so happens that AMD sent us a monster 360-mm radiator to go with its Ryzen Threadripper CPU duo, and the fine folks at Gamers Nexus have pioneered a simple method for comparing fans and heatsinks in their testing: run the fans or coolers you’re testing at the same speed and see what noise and temperature numbers come out the other end. The elegance of that approach is inarguable, so I’m employing it here, as well.

I know The Pro has more temperature sensors and USB and stuff, but is that really the only difference? Since there are many variations of the ML120s, we’ll be using the ML120 Corsair iCUE RGB Elite fans as our base. The ML120 comes with the same set of accessories that’s on the LL120s, including the fan connectors, lighting connectors, and lighting control hub. Generally, the performance-affecting components that will cost the most in a balanced build are the graphics card, processor, motherboard and RAM. Of these, the graphics card and processor are where you should probably spend any extra money you have.The other side of the lighting node pro has the USB connector, which connects to your motherboard via the USB cable that comes with the kit. One end of this USB cable is mini-USB while the other end features a nine-pin USB header. Also, there’s a SATA power connector that powers the lighting node pro. – Setting Up the Fan and Connectors