Question Confused wiring Corsair H115i RGB Platinum AIO with additional fans

jon96789

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Aug 17, 2019
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I have a MSI X570 Gaming Pro Carbon Wi-Fi motherboard with an AMD Ryzen 3900X CPU cooled by a Corsair H115i RGB Platinum AIO cooler along with two additional Corsair 140mm ML RGB fans. For the life of me, I cannot get the RGB wired correctly. I have the USB connected from the water block to the USB port. The SATA power connector has a small 3-pin connector connected to the Corsair connector on the motherboard. All the fans are connected to the RGB hub.

Only the two cooler fans are showing up on iCue with the RGB water block. The two additional fans are nowhere to be found in iCue. I cannot control the RGB lighting with iCue, the lights are stuck in Rainbow mode. I can control the fan modes (e.g. balanced, quiet or extreme) with iCue.

Any help would appreciated.

Side note, I did have MSI Mystic Light installed. It appears it did have conflicts with iCue. If I disabled RGB in Mystic Light, iCue would not control any of the lights. I uninstalled Mystic Light but that has not helped.
 
On a side note... I removed the original thermal paste from the Corsair H115i and replaced it with Thermal Grizzly Kryonaut... My idle temps jumped from 39 degrees to 42 degrees... On a whim, i replaced it with Corsair's TM30 which is rated below average... I get the same idle temps as the Kryonaut... I redid the Kryonaut and still got the same results... What the ?
 
I think you have made a connection error. I could not find the manual for the H115i Platinum system, but I got the one for the H100i Platinum system which appears to be the same except for fan size. There is a cable from the pump that has both a wide connector to get power from a SATA output from the PSU, and a small 3-hole connector separately. That latter one is solely to send the pump's speed signal to the mobo CPU_FAN header, so it MUST be plugged in there. You say instead you plugged it into the mobo JCORSAIR1 header. That header is only to supply RGB control signals to Corsair RGB lighting systems, and NOT for the pump speed connector.

Now, the RGB lights in the H115i Platinum's rad fans have their own separate cables, just as the two additional ML140 fans have, and all of these fans are of the ADDR RGB type (as opposed to plain RGB). RGB power and control is done separately from fan motor control. If you did NOT have those extra fans, the RGB cables of the H115i Platinum's rad fans would connect to the appropriate connectors on a cable from the pump unit, and the iCue software would control them that way. If you change the mis-connection above and connect the rad fans' RGB cables to the pump outputs, does that get the rad fans' lights under iCue control?

Separately you have two ML140 Pro RGB LED fans. Then I get a bit confused, because you say the two RGB fans on the water block are detected in iCue, and then you say ALL the fans are connected to the Hub. So, are the rad fans plugged into the pump outputs cables and the ML 140's connected separately to the Hub? Or are they really ALL connected to the Hub?

Then we have the "Hub". Corsair does their things a little different from others. Corsair has two separate boxes for the RGB Controller (called their Lighting Node Pro) and their RGB LED Hub, with a cable to connect the control signal output from the Node Pro to the Hub. The Node Pro has two outputs so it can handle two lighting devices all by itself. MAYBE that is how you have your two ML140 Pro RGB fans' lighting cables attached. OR you can feed one of those port's outputs via cable to the Hub, and then plug up to six lighting devices into that. Further, there is another option not detailed well in the Corsair stuff. IF you have some suitable control signals for your ADDR RGB system available from another source, you can use that as the input to the little Hub unit instead of using the Node Pro as controller. In fact, that's how the Hub is used with Corsair's more advanced unit, the Commander Pro. And your mobo HAS such a signal source - the JCORSAIR1 header. It is designed to send control signals to the Corsair RGB LED Hub, using the mobo's MSI Mystic Light software. BUT if you make that connection, then there will be NO connection from the Corsair iCue software to those lights, and that iCue will not "see" the lights that way. So you have to choose whether to use the Hub only fed from the JCORSAIR1 header and Mystic Light, or to use the Hub with the Node Pro and the iCue software.

You have not said it clearly, but I have assumed above that you have BOTH the RGB LED Hub and the Lighting Node Pro boxes with their cables. But considering the hardware you do talk about, maybe you have ONLY the Lighting Node Pro with both added ML140 Pro RGB fans plugged into its two ports. If that's the case, check also that there ARE two additional connecting cables to that Node Pro. It requires a connection to another SATA power output from the PSU for power, plus a cable from it to another mobo USB2 port. That latter cable is how the iCue software can communicate with the Node Pro. Once that is done, the two added fans' lighting should show up in iCue so you can control them. That would put ALL of the lighting under iCue, and the MSI Mystic Light software would have nothing to do, so you would leave it un-installed.
 
I do have the secondary connector from the SATA power cable to the CPU Fan header now. All the fans are connected to ports 1-4 on the Lighting Node Pro. I do have both the small hub and NoPro installed. One issue I am having is that I only have one USB header available on the mobo but I do need two...

I am in the process of ordering an internal USB hub but the recommended NZXT hub has issues where they have shorted a number of mobos... I am looking at the Aquacomputer Hubby7 internal hub or the ThermalTake H200 hub...
 
I have no personal experience with either of those Hubs, but I can comment on what the user reviews say. For the ThermalTake model, ALL the reviews are NOT for this unit!! They are for FAN hubs, most with RGB controls, too. So you have NO info from this source on the USB Hub.

For the Aquacomputer unit ,8 reviewers were very happy with it, one says it does not work when multiple devices are plugged in. BUT I suspect that last person failed to connect the SATA power supply cable from the PSU. This Hub CAN be used (it has a selector switch) with only the power from the mobo's host USB2 header, BUT that means it is limited to the max 0.5 A current available from a single USB2 port. However, if you connect the included cable to a SATA power output from the PSU and set the switch that way, then EACH output port can supply that 0.5 A max (the USB2 standard) simultaneously.
 
I ended up buying the Corsair Commander Pro, so in order to get everything running, I needed the Commander Pro, the Lighting Node Pro and the RGB LED hub. All the fans are connected to the Commander Pro, the LED cables are connected to Lighting Node Pro. The USB connectors on the hub and Node Pro are connected to the Commander Pro which is connected to the USB port on the motherboard along with three SATA power connections (I needed another SATA power cable just for the Corsair components)..

You cannot configure the lights on the H115i in iCue. You have to configure them under theCommander Pro in iCue... You also have to configure the fan speeds under the Commander Pro in iCue... It was so confusing...There are so many cables in this setup and I cannot understand why they can't make it simpler.