Lighting and Software

The main feature of the QL fans is their lighting, specifically the having two light rings on both the inside and outside facing sides of the fans. But there are a lot of cheap fan options out there. What sets some of the best RGB fans apart is the software that controls them. Easy control with lots of effects is important and some programs to put it nicely are a drain on your system. Corsair uses their iCue software for their fans and any other Corsair product which keeps things simple for their big ecosystem. So when you open it up, all of your devices are listed with photos and you can open each up. For the QL fans, it is actually the Lighting Node Core controller that comes up, because that is what controls all of the lighting.  There are just two tabs for this, one is the lighting setup page which lets you tell the controller what fan type you are running and the total number of fans. This is important because the controller needs to know the LED counts for addressable LEDs to know where each LED is.

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The lighting channel page is then where you set up all of your lighting. You can see that the three QL120 fans are shown, one box per fan with each side of the fan shown. The drop-down menu lets you select from a long list of effects and each effect has its own individual controls. Rainbow, for example, has the speed and direction, but some you can pick the colors used as well. You can get even more complicated because you can select which LEDs you want to run each effect. So you could have the inner rings doing a rainbow effect and the outers do a different effect or a sold color even. You can layer in as many as you want, going as far as setting each LED with its own effect.

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Beyond the software, the lighting itself is, of course, the whole point, right? I loved the black QL fans, but I have to say that the white QL’s look even better when lit up. The side profile look at the fans with the V-shaped frame allows you to see both sides lighting at the same time, so even when the fans are used on a radiator, for example, you can still use the lighting on both sides. Having 34 LEDs in total helps keep the entire ring lit up well. You can still see the hot spots where the LEDs are, but there aren’t any areas in the diffuser that are low on lighting.

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