Driver and Lighting

When you first power on the fan LEDs, they light up in the random test pattern seen above. This is a randomized demo mode that only serves as proof that the LEDs work, and the fans will continue to light up without any syncing unless you plug in the LED hub and Lighting Node PRO and install/run the driver. In fact, since the default recognition is as an LED strip even if you have the driver installed, the LEDs light up so that only two out of the four on the third fan are active, even though all of them are functionally fine. This can potentially confuse customers into thinking the fans are not working, and I urge Corsair to have the fans programmed accordingly.


Corsair provides software control over the lighting in their ML120 PRO RGB fans via their Corsair LINK driver, and you can find the installer on the Corsair downloads page here. The latest public release at the time of testing, version 4.9.2.27, was used for this review. The installer takes up 40 MB of space, and the final install requires 101 MB. Installation is straightforward in that you get the standard terms of service and the option to choose the install path. You are prompted to agree to install some drivers for AIOs, but those do not affect the fans or their controls.


If you had a previous install or had saved the configuration files, you are still prompted to reboot post installation, but actually don't have to do so. Once done, the home screen opens up with a lot of options pertaining to your specific system, but what we are interested in here is the Lighting Node PRO window. As seen above, you are prompted to update the device, presumably to also add in support for the new fans.

In the first video above, I update the firmware on the Lighting Node PRO and make sure the driver is the latest as well, followed by configuring the relevant section so it knows these are "RGB ML" fans as specified in the drop-down list. Now that it knows this, a fan lights up in a different mode entirely whereas the other two do not at all, which makes for another potentially confusing point for those who have not read through the manual.

If you have more than a fan connected to the fan LED hub, make sure they are connected in order from 1 through 6 in the marked ports. You now have to manually add the other fan(s) in the driver and, once done, the "Fan#" changes from 1-1 to 1-x, where x is the number of fans you have (three in my case here). The video also goes through the available lighting modes, which are numerous. In addition, there is a global brightness slider at the top with four steps, and the specific modes have specific options to choose from as well. By default, "Apply" only affects the fan clicked on in the menu, so you have to copy the effect to the fans manually, which can be annoying, but also offers the ability to selectively have different fans on different modes if you so prefer.


Here is the entire list of lighting modes available in Corsair Link for the various RGB fans they make, and we see that the ML PRO RGB fans have the same lighting modes as their older SP RGB fans, which makes sense considering both have four RGB LEDs that are hub-mounted. However, the latter do not have addressable LEDs, so Corsair has not taken full advantage of the lighting modes available on the ML PRO RGB fans here. I gave a pass to their HD and LL RGB fans since they had 12 and 16 LEDs per fan, and allowing individual control over each LED might have been too confusing to users and is also something Corsair Link doesn't handle well. But with just four per fan here, and given this is a flagship fan nonetheless, they should have really implemented the option here.


As with any product with RGB lighting, I set everything to white to see how true to color it can be. The Corsair ML PRO RGB fans do a very good job here, and part of this is due to the frosted rotors, with the white color being as good as with any RGB device I have here. However, I also noticed that one of the LEDs on fan #3 was not as white as the others. It isn't as easy to make out in the image above as with my own eyes, and perhaps this is just a color-calibration issue. Having individual LED control would have helped here too, so I stand by my complaint from before.

Here are some videos demonstrating a few of the lighting effects available in Corsair LINK. While lighting is not the primary feature here, it is big enough to where Corsair and a lot of their customers are excited about these new fans over the older ML PRO/ML PRO LED fans. As with their other fans, I will once again bring up my distaste of having to use two different drivers for a company's products. Corsair Utility Engine, for example, can individually control RGB LEDs on entire keyboards, so the four addressable LEDs here should not be a problem. Hopefully, my consistent complaints will be read by someone at Corsair who can do something about it.