[SOLVED] RGB Virgin.

[Austin_35]

Hey everyone, sorry if this is a very nooby question. I am going to be doing a new build in the Lian Li LANCOOL ll mesh rgb case with a X570 Tomahawk. I've never done a build around RGB and am oddly confused on some things that I feel are straight forward lol.

The case comes stock with 3 120mm rgb fans and control mode and color buttons on the case. The case also has 5 more slots available for 120mm fans which I will be buying the deepcool 5 pack 120mm rgb fans off Amazon. Now my question where I'm sadly confused is how do I get them to all connect to the 3 stock fans and case control buttons. Is this even possible? If its not then how would I get them all in sync with each other. Can I do it via mobo fan connectors or would I need to buy a fan hub/splitter? If I would have to buy one what would you guys recommend. That's not the $100 corsair one xD I just want to be able to control all the rgb fans colors and fan speed. Thanks everyone in advanced.

 

[Mrgr74]

Hey everyone, sorry if this is a very nooby question. I am going to be doing a new build in the Lian Li LANCOOL ll mesh rgb case with a X570 Tomahawk. I've never done a build around RGB and am oddly confused on some things that I feel are straight forward lol.

The case comes stock with 3 120mm rgb fans and control mode and color buttons on the case. The case also has 5 more slots available for 120mm fans which I will be buying the deepcool 5 pack 120mm rgb fans off Amazon. Now my question where I'm sadly confused is how do I get them to all connect to the 3 stock fans and case control buttons. Is this even possible? If its not then how would I get them all in sync with each other. Can I do it via mobo fan connectors or would I need to buy a fan hub/splitter? If I would have to buy one what would you guys recommend. That's not the $100 corsair one xD I just want to be able to control all the rgb fans colors and fan speed. Thanks everyone in advanced.

Hi @Austin_35

If I'm looking at the right 5-pack on Amazon, it comes with a fan controller. This in turn plugs into the RGB header on the mobo. (Page 27 at the top I believe) The Tomahawk is a great mobo by the way.

You'd then download Mystic Light.

You might want to take a look at these fans instead. (Look 1/2 way down the page)

 

[Paperdoc]

There's an important factor in RGB devices. And fans are included - basically any RGB fan is two devices in one unit; a fan motor, and some RGB lights mounted in its frame - and each of these two has its own separate power cable. For the LIGHTS only, there are two dominant types now, and they are incompatible, so you cannot mix the two types on one mobo header. As it happens, your mobo has headers for both types, so you can use both types as long as each type it plugged into the correct header.

The plain RGB type uses a connector with 4 pins that supply a common +12 VDC power line and three separate Ground lines, one for each of the three LED colours. The more complex Addressable RGB or ADDR RGB or ARGB (some say Digital RGB) system uses a connector with 3 pins supplying common +12 VDC and Ground lines, and a Control Line that carries addressed digital info packets to small local control chips all along the light strip. In each case, the lighting connector plugs into the output from a RGB or ARGB controller. Your mobo comes with both types of controllers built in, and has two output headers for each of these types. The JRGB ones are for the plain RGB type, and the JRAINBOW ones are for the ARGB type.

Completely separate from these, each fan also has a cable ending in a female standard fan connector with either 3 holes or 4. These go to mobo fan headers.

According to the Lian Li case web page, the lights in the front panel are of the 3-pin ARGB type. They are pre-installed and connected to a case-installed ARGB controller. You control their display through two top-front-mounted buttons, and one of them has a setting to turn over control to a mobo header instead. For that, there is a cable from that case control board to plug into a mobo header, and this MUST go to one of your JRAINBOW headers since they are ARGB lights. The web page does not give any details at all about the FANS supplied with it - does not even tell you how many or whether or not they include lights in the fan frames. But IF they do have lights, and IF you verify that they have 3-hole ARGB connectors on their cables, then they also need to be connected similar to the case lights. The question for them, then, would be where? Are there sockets on the controller board in the case to supply the fan lights as well as the case lights? Or, do the fans have to go to the second mobo JRAINBOW header?

As Mrgr74 said above, you have not told us exactly which Deepcool 5-pack of fans you are buying. They make lighted fans in both types. IF you are getting the Deepcool RF120M set, those are of the other type - the plain RGB ones. They come with daisy-chain wiring connectors for the lights in the frames, so you plug only one of them into a mobo JRGB header and the others just plug into a previous fan of that group. For motors, though, the set comes with a fan Hub that you use to power them. HOWEVER, if the Deepcool fans you get are NOT this type, that changes the way it's done.

The MSI mobo comes with a CD of utilities that will include their Mystic Light tool (or you can download that). This is used for software control of both types of lighting headers. Because they are of different designs, the displays you can generate are different for the two types, but within each type all of the units will display the same thing synchronized.