Usage & The Lights
If you’ve connected things correctly when you power your system on you’ll see the fans spin up and the lights should turn on. By default the effect that starts is the rainbow wave, which is probably the most popular RGB effect out there.
As I mentioned earlier the RGB LEDs are in the center of each fan. I am actually surprised at just how bright these fans are given there are no RGBs in the frame.
To give you an idea of just how bright these fans are here is a comparison against all of the other RGB fans we’ve reviewed in the past.
Now when it comes to controlling the fans unfortunately we do not have a motherboard with an addressable RGB header. As a reminder this is not a normal 4-pin RGB header, but rather a 3-pin addressable RGB header. So our control is limited to the included RGB controller. Using the supplied photo from the Cooler Master website we sort of get an idea of what the controls are.
So the first button is RGB controller mode, this will actually cycle through the six included effects. The “lighting mode switch” is actually a speed switch, it will control the speed of each effect. Then you have thermal detection mode, which changes colors based on the temperature of the included temperature probe. Finally there is the “External Addressable RGB” button, which gives control over to your motherboard if you have the kit connected to it.
The six included effects are pretty basic except for the rainbow wave effect. I was quite surprised that I couldn’t just cycle through solid colors. All of the effects cycle through colors, so for example the breathing mode will start with red, then go to orange, etc and there is no way to just have it on a single color.
So I would say the controller is definitely limited and there is no software control provided by Cooler Master either.
