Lighting

As the name suggests, the CORSAIR iCUE SP RGB ELITE fans have RGB lightning software support via iCUE. The latest public version at the time of review was 4.9.338, and the installer can be found here. We covered this all-new iCUE in detail with the CORSAIR K65 RGB MINI earlier this week, so I won't repeat anything I mentioned there. If the fans are connected to the Lighting Node CORE, which in turn is connected to an internal USB 2.0 header, iCUE will recognize the controller immediately and allow for control of the chosen devices as seen in the video above.

There are a plethora of lighting options after you have correctly chosen the type and number of connected devices, which was not as straightforward in that there are multiple options under the 8-LED fan group, and you need to first get the number of the default selection to 1, select 5 of these, and then de-select the default fan by clicking on it. You can also set up custom effects, and have sequential lighting depending on the order in which the fans were connected to the Lighting Node CORE. That having been said, there is a weird little thing here wherein the chosen cable orientation means you have to put some additional thought into the cable management to make sure the LEDs are in order when going from the fans in the front to those in the back of a case, for example. Although not a deal breaker given the fan cable is relatively long, it could have easily been solved by simply having the cable come out the other side of the fan.


I am still setting up a test PC for some review categories, so I had to use my personal PC here, which only had one spare fan header. As such, seen above is a look at an SP120 RGB ELITE fan both lit up and running at full speed. There are eight individually addressable RGB LED headers in the central fan hub, with the frosted rotor diffusing the light further towards the frame. As such, and especially during a dynamic (preset) effect, the lighting is brightest and most uniform in the middle and less so at the edges.


Here, you can see all five SP RGB ELITE fans in my possession connected to the Lighting Node CORE, but with the motors not running in the absence of an accessible PWM splitter just yet. The static white on the fans looks better than on most keyboards, but also shows that the larger 140 mm fans are simply not lit as well as the 120 mm fans because physics can't be beat. The circle of light emanating from the center only goes so far as the LEDs are the same in both fans, and coverage is smaller than the area occupied by the 140 mm rotor. This issue is not as big a deal as the camera makes it out to be in person, as seen with the higher exposure compensation for the first video above compared to the others.