I've not been that keen on Corsair products over the years, mostly due to how much they restrict you to their ecosystem, and partly because of how complex some of it can get. In particularly, their fans in recent years have been not desirable to me as the entire process seemed entirely overbearing with how much you needed to do to get them up and running, particularly with RGB. While iCue hasn't been that bad for me, I've seen the horror stories across the internet with that software as well. That all said, these intrigued me. I was curious about the lighting and having purchased their light towers, had a reason to use iCue on my test bench. So I decided to give these a go right out of the gate, had reason to praise Corsair. Instead of requiring multiple pieces to get the RGB lighting to work, you only need the included Lighting Node Core, which allows up to 6 fans to be connected for the lighting. That then connects to your motherboard via an internal USB 2.0 header, and you're off and running. For the fan speed, you still need to connect them, but there's nothing proprietary there. I chose to use a three-way splitter and connect them to a 4-pin PWM header on my motherboard. Right off the bat, these fans look spectacular. The ability to not just change the outer ring, but the inner ring is great on its own, but you can go even further as they've divided the zones into front and back as well. This means you can really get crazy with the lighting effects and combos, which is something Corsair has done very well over the years. There are 34 total LED's per fan, which is just insane to think about. The fans themselves operate up to 1500RPM, which isn't the fastest by far, but will be good enough for most. They aren't terribly noisy for the most part, although they're noticeable at their highest speed, but then again, most fans are going to be noticeable when cranked all the way up. I had these on an AIO radiator and they performed just fine, keeping temps on an AMD 3600X pretty reasonable, even under a constant Cinebench load. In short, you won't notice any cooling changes switching to these, unless you always operate your fans at full blast and are coming from EK Vardar fans or something else that comes in at a higher speed. When these fans first launched, finding them for a decent price was impossible as they seemed to run anywhere from $130-150, which is very, very steep. Even at around $105-115, which is where they've been the last few months, they're still very expensive, especially when you consider some fans can be found for under $60 for a 3 pack. You're paying for the Corsair name, so how much that's worth to you will determine if these are a good value for you. Personally, I think if they're around $100 and you already have a healthy Corsair ecosystem, they can be worth it. I personally prefer Lian Li's Uni Fans, especially with how much cabling they remove from the equation and how light the software is to control them. All that said, they're beautiful fans that perform pretty well. If you don't mind the cost and are invested in Corsair's ecosystem, you'll be happy with these. Simply put, I've not seen fans that can compare in terms of how much you can do with the lighting, so how much that matters will determine if these are worth it to you.
