Software Control and Lighting

Connecting the individual fans was the easy bit, and I was very impressed by how solid the connections were. Even lifting the ensemble of three fans on a fan corner felt natural and led to no play between individual fans. It made me wonder why modular keyboards haven't gotten this part right yet! But keyboards don't have to worry about a multitude of connected cables, and a single cable from the fans leads to the UNI Hub itself. The back of the hub controller has a rectangular recess and comes with double-sided tape to stick it to the back of the motherboard tray in your case to hide the cable mess. In this case, the power module cable is attached to a 7-pin port on the hub. As such, the others are available for other fans, or compatible devices. Then comes the part where up to five connectors from the hub—two SATA power connections, one internal 9-pin USB, and a 4-pin PWM—go to an available fan header on your motherboard and a 3-pin 5 V ARGB LED connector goes to your motherboard's onboard LED header. Don't use a third-party controller. Using the motherboard ports ensures the USB connection sees them as expected, with the hub having software control that is only looking for them. I initially had issues getting the fan motors to turn until I figured this out, as I was going to use my own fan controller as per usual to map the PWM/RPM curves; the poorly written user guides don't help much since they omit the PWM fan header part entirely. It could just be potentially buggy firmware on the controller preventing external controllers from working since I don't see a reason why this hub doesn't simply function as one anyway.


Given the complexity in setup and operation, I decided to talk more about the software as you are effectively forced to use Lian Li's L-Connect3 software to do anything useful with these fans. I was provided version 1.1.27 separately as part of the review process, which is newer than the currently available public version on this page as this is written, but should be hosted there by the time this review is published. Ideally, it would be a newer version still with fixed bugs since there are a few in this version. The program also licenses TPU's own GPU-z and has it running in the background, which is how it gets the CPU and GPU temperatures in addition to current usage metrics. Getting it running was a hassle and required multiple attempts before everything worked, but once the program was up and running, it didn't have issues outside of high system resource utilization.

With L-Connect3, you can set up and modify fan curves for the four available 7-pin ports on the UNI hub, which expect you to have four fans each. You can synchronize them all up or do it on a per-channel basis. Notice the on/off functionality for the fans to fully turn off if the hardware components are under 50°C, and you can turn this feature off, too. 10–100% PWM duty cycle custom curve configuration with the actual RPM readout at the top is available, which I happily used for fan performance testing. A separate lighting tab goes over the equivalent options for the onboard LEDs, with the fan renders showing the effects while providing various options specific to these lighting effects, including the ability to individually control the LED ring around the hub or LED strips in the frame, although the way you select the individual color is very janky because of the sliders that are used. The device-specific page effectively presents a summary of both menus, and I was left wanting a more polished program here.


I am under no illusion that the unique selling point for the Lian Li UNI Fan SL-INF 120 is the LED lighting, with these fans taking the best from the previous Lian Li SL and AL fan series. There are a total of 40 LEDs per fan split across two LED strips in the frame and a ring around the hub, which not only shine through both sides for direct lighting, but also provide for an infinity mirror effect with the reflective strips and hub badge having consecutive layers ~0.5 mm apart. It's not very strong and requires viewing the fans from a steeper angle than with cases that employ the infinity mirror effect. That having been said, installed on the front or top of the case which is placed at an angle relative to your seated position will naturally allow some of the lighting to shine through quite literally. Seen above are the three fans lit up and running in a few different effects to give you a better idea of what to expect, and for a more cohesively lit up system, coordinating the lighting with the motherboard is possible, too.