Software Control and Lighting

As before, software control for Lian Li's UNI FAN series comes in the form of the so-called L-Connect 3 software. I was provided several beta versions as part of the review process, which are all newer than the currently available public version on this page as this is written, but there should be a stable, compatible version hosted there by the time these fans are shipping to customers. Installation is trivial but these are unified drivers for various Lian Li products, and thus the program takes over 1 GB on your PC. It's thankfully not as buggy as my last encounter with L-Connect 3—at least when it comes to these non-LCD fans—but could certainly be better optimized. I also noticed random CPU and memory spikes with the program running in the foreground or background, albeit nothing that should be a dealbreaker.

With the wireless controller plugged in and the fans powered on—note that the fans will flash white if the power off the 4-pin connector is insufficient, in which case you need to use the SATA adapter—the first thing I had to do was bind the fans to the controller, which is quite simple. You can also identify which fans are being bound to the controller by forcing them to turn a static color, which is nice to see. Currently, the controller can be bound to as many as eight fans, although Lian Li is promising an increase to 10 fans sooner than later. These can be mixed across other fans too, as well as the wireless strimer cables. At this point, you can go about customizing the fans as seen in the video. This includes choosing and modifying existing fan curves or setting up your own based on CPU or GPU temperature, as well as allowing a flat RPM metric for one or all fans collectively. There is also a toggle to allow the start/stop feature on these fans—I am not sure why this is not left on by default. At this point, I realized I was not seeing any PWM control anymore, with L-Connect 3 showing only direct RPM control as a deliberate UI change based on customer feedback seemingly. I tried using the controller with the adapter cable and used the 4-pin cable with three different PWM fan control solutions, but they never even saw the fans. Lian Li's CEO himself got on a video call with me a day before this review is published to show how this feature works, and it's not trivial. You have to use that 4-pin cable from the controller on a motherboard fan header, turn on MB Sync in L-Connect 3, use PWM fan control on the motherboard even if these fans aren't detected there, and then use L-Connect 3 for RPM monitoring. I think it's fair to say most people are unlikely to do this diligently, especially since it completely negates the whole point of the wireless controller and you now having to awkwardly placing this big USB drive enclosure somewhere in your PC, and this revelation came too late for me to map things out too despite having contacted Lian Li about this last week. If you have a complete Lian Li ecosystem then this is a non-issue, direct RPM control still works fine with the fan curve options seen above, but it feels like a step taken towards a fully closed ecosystem.


Obviously RGB lighting is a key selling point of these fans, especially with as many as 40 LEDs in each fan. But these are all not individually addressable, with each fan having two zones of control—the main section going around the frame and then the top/bottom with more LEDs in the middle. You have per-fan control of the LEDs, as with setting up per-fan RPM curves too, although again it's more likely that each group of fans will be controlled together. Here there are preset static and dynamic lighting effects with options of speed, brightness, and direction (if applicable), in addition to being able to choose the specific color where it makes sense. The end result is a fan that doesn't light up as much as you might think, and this is predominantly from the opaque rotor and frame, so this is no different from the previous gen UNI FAN SL fans from Lian Li. They do fire light outwards a lot though, so these fans can illuminate the actual PC depending on how they are positioned. Seen above are some examples of the fans lit up outside the PC case, so you can see how these look at night. L-Connect 3 also allows you to quickly sync up lighting with other compatible devices connected to your motherboard, although I have not tested this feature personally.