You can see the colored lights on the case fans that change colors with time. That goes well with the cooling fan for the RYZEN 9 processor which does the same sort of thing. If only it hadn’t given me a fan error. One thing I do like about the case was that in order to keep the view of the pretty interior lights unobstructed by unsightly cables, it made routing them under the motherboard relatively easy. Some parts of hookin up the colored light controls were a bit of a puzzle. I just made sure that the pin out on the motherboard matched the connector from a small controller board that came with the case and hoped for the best. There were all sorts of words about this generationn or that generation connector. I could see that one version had +12V, R,G,B signals and I used those. Seems to work, though I haven’t pressed the lighting mode button on the front panel yet. Aren’t those fans prettty? Notice there is no place to put a DVD drive? But lets have pretty fans. Who needs a DVD drive anyway ... well unless you need to install Windows for a disk. Fortunately, I had an external DVD drive that plugged into the USB connector and was able to start the install process. During the Windows install, I hit another problem. You know how the install says .... this machine will restart several times? That is when the ‘CPU fan’ error happened. Which wants you to go into BIOS and make some magic correction. I did play with the fan profile and save that, but from what I could tell, the system did recognize that the fan was connected. I could see that the fan was spinning with all its pretty lights and I checked the connector to make sure it was plugged into the CPU fan jack. I couldn’t complete the windows install unless I could get past the error. The internet suggested that I check the connector and if all else fails, I could change the setting for monitoring the CPU fan from auto to ignore. One might do this if they had a liquid cooling system. So that is what I did. And Windows 10 installed with no more surprises.
Back to those pretty case fans. One of the things I noticed was that besides not leaving any room for a DVD drive, the front of the case is clear, unperferated plastic. So those fans aren’t sucking in air from the front face of the case, they are actually getting the air from vents along the 1st inch of the side. So I can imagine the efficiency is not as high as they could be. But who could have a gaming computer without pretty lights on their fans. The CPU temperature seems to be just fine though.
