- It's an age-old question, at least in the modern age:
to RGB, or to not RGB? Well, today, we have just the solution.
You can take your not-RGB and apparently make it RGB.
At least that's what they say. So we're gonna try today to make this Noctua fan,
something that is traditionally never RGB, and I swear that they'll probably never
come out with an RGB version of their fans, and with the help of Phanteks, make it RGB.
Let's see how well it works. I mean, on the outside, not really a lot going on.
♪ Cha ♪ Oh my god, that's not even in the middle.
(laughing) What is that? Look at that. "Made from one single piece of aluminum."
So this is supposed to be a really nice CNC-milled piece.
You can see on the back it's got sort of a diffused ring.
And I think there's 18 LEDs in here? 30 LEDs. Wow.
"Illuminate any fan. Fan screws included to mount halos directly onto the fan."
Radiator screws in case you're using a radiator. That's sweet, because if you were gonna use this...
Look at how thick that is. If you were gonna try to mount that on an existing radiator,
the screws would probably not be long enough, so that's quite nice, although they don't look that long.
Maybe that's a little longer. We'll test it right now. I got the fan, got the frame.
Oh. (laughs) With Noctua fans and their little rubber bumpers...
You could probably get that to thread in. You might have to take the rubber off, I'm not sure.
Yeah, you gotta wear protection. Protect your fans.
It looks pretty sleek, hey? Yeah, this is good. Nice and simple.
It's not gonna change your existing fan's look too much, although not that Noctua fans have much of a look.
Okay, so it is not like your standard
sort of 4-pin RGB layout. They do seem to have their own connector.
But they do include an adapter cable, so you can take their proprietary-ish connector
and just plug it right into your motherboard, so that'd be nice. If you had multiple fans,
you could get an addressable RGB splitter and then you'd wire it into this
and then you can plug in as many fans as you want. It also looks like, if you have multiple fans,
you can daisy chain them, which is pretty nice. This seems like sort of a solution...
I mean, there's two school of thought here. It's people that want the crazy, silent performance
of a Noctua fan and also want RGB, and there's the people that don't want to spend
$40 a fan on RGB fans, but also still want RGB.
So it looks like the cheapest you can get one of these frames for is $17.99,
so I think there is only one school of thought,
and that is that you like Noctua fans and you want them to be RGB.
Or maybe you don't want to tear all the fans out of your computer, but at the same time,
to install these you're gonna be taking a fan out,
putting it in between, sticking it back in, and then rewiring it anyways,
So is it better? I don't know. Okay, let's go over how hard this is to install.
So you got your fan here. Eh? Eh?
I'm done. That was pretty easy. I love RGB. Oh, no. (whimpers)
One thing I'm noticing is that the spot that the wiring comes off the frame is not the same as where it does on this fan.
If you were to put it on this side, it would be pretty much the same.
And you can see there, they're kind of on the same side, but that might get kind of annoying.
In most cases, usually the fans,
on the front at least, the cabling is sort of tucked behind, so it's not that big of a deal.
But if you were to install these maybe on the back fan,
you might notice it a little more. All right, so it's mostly in there. One thing I'm noticing
is that you're not gonna have RGB on the back of your fan,
which for some people might be an issue. I know a lot of people have RGB fans
as their only light source in their computer, rather than having, say, strips on the inside
and then fans on the front. They just use the back glow of an RGB fan
to light the inside of the computer. You'll get that a bit through,
but I don't think it's gonna have the same ambience
as an actual RGB fan. But I guess we'll have to see. And so for the second one, for a bit of comparison,
we're gonna have our black Noctua fan, and then I'm gonna put this slim white fan,
because it's the only white fan I could find, just to show you what it kind of looks like
on a black fan versus a white fan. So yeah, you totally could put it on the back.
I mean, maybe I will, just for show. Yeah, let's do it. I want to see what it looks like.
So yes, we have our black fan, our white fan. I put it on both sides on the black fan
and then just on the one side on the white fan. And now I think we can power it up.
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Whoa-ho-ho! Wow, actually. Jeez.
That looks pretty cool, actually. First glance, the black one, it's not that lit up.
But you can see the ring, which kinda looks cool in its own sense.
But the white one looks pretty sweet. Look at that. I kinda think the black looks cool,
especially with the back light too. It almost looks like an infinity mirror or something.
Yeah, you're definitely gonna get more RGB effect
out of a white fan. But the black one looks pretty cool too. I want to see what it looks like on the inside.
Not that special. Okay, it does bleed through a little bit on the white fan.
Okay, so according to their website, this supports Aura Sync, the MSI one, the Gigabyte one.
It probably also supports the Razer one. It's basically, if your motherboard has an RGB header on it,
it's gonna support whatever software. I loaded up Aura Sync and we've got it synced up
with our RAM and our motherboard. So I want to go like a static color.
I kinda want to see what it looks like just white. Okay.
Hmm. Looks okay. Man, I'm kind of struggling here.
I think the only use case for these is if you are absolute, hardcore,
must-have-the-best Noctua fans. What else do we got here? We got Rainbow.
Yeah, it's not that great of an effect. What? Really? Wow, some of these effects are kinda bad.
"Glowing Yoyo." It's just dim. (laughing) Like, what?
Yeah, I mean... I kinda like it, but, ah.
If they were five bucks each or you could buy a pack of four for like 20 bucks.
Ah, I don't know, man. I think we at least achieved the goal
of making a Noctua fan RGB.
But probably gonna give this a pass unless you're just super anal.
If you're looking for something else to watch that's computer hardware-related, why don't you check out my unboxing
of an AMD Epyc server with 128 cores.
That was pretty sweet. It definitely didn't have any RGB, so maybe we could've used these.