Introduction

Lian Li has had a strong few years now, starting with its reinvigorated design and engineering team and then releasing some of the more interesting cases, CPU coolers, fans, RGB accessories and even power supplies. These at least make you acknowledge the brand for trying new things that often result in commercial successes. At Computex earlier this year, Lian Li had a massive booth showcasing its upcoming products, and one thing in particular caught my eye—the new wireless fans and strimer cables. You see, the company reps had set up a table with multiple RGB fans and strimer cables positioned far away from the PC itself, without any wires going between them. Sure, the fans were still powered by a cable, and then I realized this was effectively the equivalent of a wireless keyboard or mouse with a USB adapter allowing for a wireless connection to the PC itself. It's now October and Lian Li has released the fans, and so of course I had to get a review done for those interested.


This is a quick look article of the UNI FAN SL 120 Wireless LCD Reverse, which is quite a mouthful and you may well see it referred to as something else using those words in a different combination, perhaps. Regardless, when I was first contacted on behalf of Lian Li for coverage on these fans, I had requested they send 2-3 of each of the regular and LCD versions to allow for statistical accuracy in testing. I was not aware at the time that both fans would come not only in black or white colors, but also standard and reverse blade configurations. This led to me receiving a triple pack of the UNI FAN SL120 Wireless, and there is a full review of those fans here which you should read before coming back here. Those came alongside a triple pack of the LCD fans in reverse blade configuration, which normally would also get a full review, but several things happened over the course of my time with these fans which prevented me from testing them out before launch day, and I decided to push this article out so people know what to expect. Thanks to Lian Li for providing review samples to TechPowerUp and let's begin with a look at the product specifications in the table below.

Specifications

Packaging and Accessories

As mentioned before, I was sent a triple pack of the UNI FAN SL 120 Wireless LCD Reverse fans, and these ship in a thick box adorned in black and blue colors. On the front is a render of the fans lit up with the LCD front hubs and the wireless connection shown right away, and your get confirmation of the blade orientation and fan color too. Another render, this time also of the controller, greets us on the back where we also find product specifications, a list of contents, and various marketing features. There are more illustrations on the sides in addition to seals and a double flap helping keep the contents inside in place during transit. Open the box to find a smaller cardboard box that contains the wireless controller and optional adapter cable, with the other accessories around it. These include paperwork for the controller itself as well as three sets of four metal self-tapping screws to use these as case fans.


More relevant are the various cables and the receiver + controller system, making these fans an updated take on Lian Li's UNI FAN series of products that have been released over the last two years. In fact, the LCD fans are also not new themselves, it's more that the control system is now technically wireless. You get a receiver cable that helps power and control the fans, and we see this is different from the one included with the non-LCD fans in that you need not only a spare 4-pin fan header for power but also a 9-pin internal USB 2.0 header for data going to the LCDs in each fan. At this point I really don't know why the controller was made wireless at all! Regardless, Lian Li also provides a SATA to triple female 4-pin cable to directly power the fans from the PSU if your motherboard fan header does not suffice for, say, three of these fans connected together. The controller is the same as we saw before with the non-LCD fans, except again this comes paired to the LCD fan receiver/adapter cable. The controller is shaped like a large USB drive complete with a removable cover, and on the other end is a 7-pin port that the optional controller cable plugs into. This cable terminates in another 9-pin internal USB 2.0 header and a second 4-pin PWM fan header. You get a separate set of instructions with the fans themselves, which we see come in individual bubble wrap covers and placed between more foam sheets for added protection. Remember to peel off the protective plastic cover from the LCD hub, and you are good to go now.

Closer Examination

As with a lot of such daisy-chain enabled fans, including of course the UNI FAN SL 120 Wireless we see discussed alongside, these UNI FAN SL 120 Wireless LCD Reverse fans provide a clean aesthetic with no cables or wires seen from the side, at least for most of the fans in a group. They come in black or white to better match your build, and once again I think the white version will look more cohesive with the frosted white plastic sections in the frame used to diffuse the RGB lighting integrated in these fans. Note that the fans measure in at 124.5 x 120 x 28 mm, making them take slightly more room than standard 25 mm fans. Some of this is from the corner sticking out with them seemingly sealed on both sides by silicone rubber anti-vibration pads, but Lian Li has cleverly added small cutouts that can be removed from the larger pads to access the screw holes easily. These are also spaced such that the fans are now compatible with any screws intended for 25 mm thick fans in general, and then you can place these back for a cleaner look when installed. The fans are made of PBT plastic and the rotor has nine highly curved and narrower blades which seem more optimized for a static pressure use case. But then you realize this version has reverse blades, meaning the air is sucked from back to front and the stator vanes + hubs are large deadspots which will hurt performance. These would be used in a pull configuration, say in cases that have vertical fan/radiator mounts on the side or front, allowing you to see the LEDs better, and then there's of course the relatively large—thus making the fan blades even shorter courtesy the large bezels all around—1.6" LCD hub with a resolution of 400×400 pixels. It supports both static images (JPG/PNG), GIFs, and even videos (MP4), in addition to working as a quick sensor panel for useful system metrics as we will soon see.


Two opposing sides are used to daisy-chain the fans with interlocking plastic "keys" and pins that fit into the open locks on the other end—simply align the mating sides of two fans and slot one into the other from the top or bottom. Then simply repeat the process, with Lian Li currently suggesting a single chain of three fans, although I would like to see official testing and recommendations for up to four per side to allow compatibility with even quad 120 mm radiators. The interlocking plastic keys can be rotated and removed on the fan not using them, which frees up room past the fan frame and avoids interference with radiator ports or case panels. Looking at the back side, there is a sticker on the hub, but it does not contain any 3rd-party tested power/current draw numbers here as usual with other fans. Lian Li is rating the UNI FAN SL 120 Wireless LCD Reverse for up to 2.64 W of input power, which means you should be still able to power 3–4 fans off a standard 1 A header no problem—the three samples here certainly had no issues. Each fan uses an undisclosed fluid dynamic bearing, and I did not get any further information about the motor or bearing. Perhaps the product page, when live, will shed more light, but I think it would be fair to assume these won't be that different from the previous generation fans.


Once you have set up the fans together, the next step is to connect the provided adapter cable to the exposed side of the fan on the end. This has more pins than before on the previous gen UNI FAN SL fans, and is also where the 2.4 GHz wireless connectivity from the controller comes into play. The connection process is similar in that you slot the plastic keys into the matching holes in the frame and push the module in the direction of the pointing arrow. This means you need to orient it correctly, but Lian Li allows you to take off the cover of the housing to move the cable to the other side entirely, if it works out better for cable management. In fact, there is also some room between the cover and the body to wrap the flat ribbon cable around to shorten the exposed cable side for a cleaner look. Keep in mind that you will still have two cables going to a 4-pin PWM header (or PSU via the SATA adapter cable) as well as the internal USB 2.0 cable, so you will still have to think about careful cable management in this "wireless" system. The wireless controller then plugs into an available USB port, with Lian Li recommending you only use the ports on the back of your motherboard for a smoother experience. If you don't have one available or don't like how it looks, you can also just plug it internally using the controller adapter cable, which again requires a spare internal USB 2.0 and PWM connection, with the latter supposed to give you PWM speed control over the fans and allow you to sync the fan speed with other fans connected to the motherboard. The way it works is not trivial though, with the motherboard not seeing these fans in its UI. So you need to set the PWM duty cycle with your motherboard's control software and Lian Li's software is then needed to check the actual RPM. Not very practical, and I only got to know about this one day before launch day.

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 multiple beta versions as part of the review process, which are newer than the currently available public version on this page as this is written, but there should be a newer, compatible version hosted there by the time this review is published. 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 was certainly less buggy with the non-LCD fans, even if it wasn't optimized well, but this time almost everything which could go wrong ended up doing so.

I did a clean install of the latest beta release provided on October 15, which aimed to address some of the massive bugs from the previous version. But somehow this was even worse in a few ways when it comes to these LCD fans. On multiple occasions the software didn't recognize the fans at all. The first few times were because one of the provided fans was clearly not functional, and that left two fans which still presented too many challenges. These included no RPM readout at all, as seen in the first image above. There were also several bugs with the LCD functionality, many of which were already known to Lian Li. To its credit, they've been working almost non-stop to resolve the issues. It is now October 17 and I was provided with another beta release that solved the fan control issue at least, albeit not to the point where I have time to do any performance testing—I had contacted Lian Li last week to get this resolved, for what it's worth. The LCD functions were being treated with more priority, which makes sense for these fans, and it went from a product that had several features not working or outright breaking the software drivers to something that feels stable enough to make use of.


I should reiterate that these fans do have a lot of potential. The non-reverse versions are likely to perform well even with the massive LCD hub resulting in shorter blades. There's plenty of RGB lighting in multiple zones thanks to the 40 LEDs per fan, and quite a few preset lighting effects too even if you don't get per-RGB control. The LCD is also one of the more responsive panels I've seen used in such a product, allowing you to even have minutes-long videos running on it if you so desire. Even complex GIFs are no challenge with smooth playback and fairly accurate color reproduction too. The software also allows you to set these to have CPU/GPU temps or load as real time metrics, and of course you can upload your own static image too. Given my experience with these fans though, I felt I had to put the TPU logo and the "But Expensive" design on the two fans. Things are improving though, and Lian Li is still working on the software to where it expects to have a satisfactory experience available by the time the fans are in the hands of customers. I sure hope they manage to do this too, since that's the only way Lian Li can try to justify the $42 asking price for one fan + receiver, which goes up to $135 for a triple pack that also includes the $18 wireless controller set. If you absolutely need LCDs on fans for whatever reason, maybe also check out the non-wireless versions of these fans which hopefully present a smoother experience out of the box.