How To Get RGB With Noctua Fans - Phanteks Halo Lux Fan Frames
ShortCircuit
·ShortCircuit
·2022-05-05
·
1,422 words · ~7 min read
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- It's an age-old question, at least in the modern age:
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to RGB, or to not RGB? Well, today, we have just the solution.
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You can take your not-RGB and apparently make it RGB.
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At least that's what they say. So we're gonna try today to make this Noctua fan,
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something that is traditionally never RGB, and I swear that they'll probably never
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come out with an RGB version of their fans, and with the help of Phanteks, make it RGB.
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Let's see how well it works. I mean, on the outside, not really a lot going on.
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♪ Cha ♪ Oh my god, that's not even in the middle.
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(laughing) What is that? Look at that. "Made from one single piece of aluminum."
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So this is supposed to be a really nice CNC-milled piece.
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You can see on the back it's got sort of a diffused ring.
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And I think there's 18 LEDs in here? 30 LEDs. Wow.
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"Illuminate any fan. Fan screws included to mount halos directly onto the fan."
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Radiator screws in case you're using a radiator. That's sweet, because if you were gonna use this...
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Look at how thick that is. If you were gonna try to mount that on an existing radiator,
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the screws would probably not be long enough, so that's quite nice, although they don't look that long.
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Maybe that's a little longer. We'll test it right now. I got the fan, got the frame.
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Oh. (laughs) With Noctua fans and their little rubber bumpers...
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You could probably get that to thread in. You might have to take the rubber off, I'm not sure.
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Yeah, you gotta wear protection. Protect your fans.
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It looks pretty sleek, hey? Yeah, this is good. Nice and simple.
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It's not gonna change your existing fan's look too much, although not that Noctua fans have much of a look.
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Okay, so it is not like your standard
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sort of 4-pin RGB layout. They do seem to have their own connector.
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But they do include an adapter cable, so you can take their proprietary-ish connector
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and just plug it right into your motherboard, so that'd be nice. If you had multiple fans,
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you could get an addressable RGB splitter and then you'd wire it into this
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and then you can plug in as many fans as you want. It also looks like, if you have multiple fans,
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you can daisy chain them, which is pretty nice. This seems like sort of a solution...
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I mean, there's two school of thought here. It's people that want the crazy, silent performance
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of a Noctua fan and also want RGB, and there's the people that don't want to spend
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$40 a fan on RGB fans, but also still want RGB.
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So it looks like the cheapest you can get one of these frames for is $17.99,
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so I think there is only one school of thought,
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and that is that you like Noctua fans and you want them to be RGB.
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Or maybe you don't want to tear all the fans out of your computer, but at the same time,
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to install these you're gonna be taking a fan out,
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putting it in between, sticking it back in, and then rewiring it anyways,
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So is it better? I don't know. Okay, let's go over how hard this is to install.
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So you got your fan here. Eh? Eh?
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I'm done. That was pretty easy. I love RGB. Oh, no. (whimpers)
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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.
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If you were to put it on this side, it would be pretty much the same.
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And you can see there, they're kind of on the same side, but that might get kind of annoying.
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In most cases, usually the fans,
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on the front at least, the cabling is sort of tucked behind, so it's not that big of a deal.
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But if you were to install these maybe on the back fan,
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you might notice it a little more. All right, so it's mostly in there. One thing I'm noticing
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is that you're not gonna have RGB on the back of your fan,
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which for some people might be an issue. I know a lot of people have RGB fans
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as their only light source in their computer, rather than having, say, strips on the inside
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and then fans on the front. They just use the back glow of an RGB fan
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to light the inside of the computer. You'll get that a bit through,
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but I don't think it's gonna have the same ambience
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as an actual RGB fan. But I guess we'll have to see. And so for the second one, for a bit of comparison,
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we're gonna have our black Noctua fan, and then I'm gonna put this slim white fan,
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because it's the only white fan I could find, just to show you what it kind of looks like
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on a black fan versus a white fan. So yeah, you totally could put it on the back.
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I mean, maybe I will, just for show. Yeah, let's do it. I want to see what it looks like.
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So yes, we have our black fan, our white fan. I put it on both sides on the black fan
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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.
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That looks pretty cool, actually. First glance, the black one, it's not that lit up.
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But you can see the ring, which kinda looks cool in its own sense.
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But the white one looks pretty sweet. Look at that. I kinda think the black looks cool,
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especially with the back light too. It almost looks like an infinity mirror or something.
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Yeah, you're definitely gonna get more RGB effect
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out of a white fan. But the black one looks pretty cool too. I want to see what it looks like on the inside.
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Not that special. Okay, it does bleed through a little bit on the white fan.
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Okay, so according to their website, this supports Aura Sync, the MSI one, the Gigabyte one.
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It probably also supports the Razer one. It's basically, if your motherboard has an RGB header on it,
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it's gonna support whatever software. I loaded up Aura Sync and we've got it synced up
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with our RAM and our motherboard. So I want to go like a static color.
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I kinda want to see what it looks like just white. Okay.
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Hmm. Looks okay. Man, I'm kind of struggling here.
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I think the only use case for these is if you are absolute, hardcore,
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must-have-the-best Noctua fans. What else do we got here? We got Rainbow.
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Yeah, it's not that great of an effect. What? Really? Wow, some of these effects are kinda bad.
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"Glowing Yoyo." It's just dim. (laughing) Like, what?
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Yeah, I mean... I kinda like it, but, ah.
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If they were five bucks each or you could buy a pack of four for like 20 bucks.
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Ah, I don't know, man. I think we at least achieved the goal
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of making a Noctua fan RGB.
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But probably gonna give this a pass unless you're just super anal.
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If you're looking for something else to watch that's computer hardware-related, why don't you check out my unboxing
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of an AMD Epyc server with 128 cores.
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That was pretty sweet. It definitely didn't have any RGB, so maybe we could've used these.