|
|
Rainbow LED Fan |
Join the community - in the OCAU Forums!
|
Mounting, Usage, Conclusions
Mounting the fan is very simple, assuming you have an appropriate 80mm fan space in your case. Virtually every case nowadays has an 80mm fan at the lower front and space for at least one on the back. The Lian-Li PC-6077 (review here) has two such mounting spaces on the back of the removable motherboard tray. One is normally occupied with a stock non-glowing fan, so I removed that and installed both Rainbow LED fans instead. Given that only one of the fans I have for testing was the full retail kit you would receive, I only had one set of mounting clips. No matter, as this is a standard 80mm fan in terms of mounting, you can use whatever mounting system is provided with your case. Most will be simply screws, but the Lian-Li provides push-through black plastic clips.
Above we see the Rainbow LED fan's screw-in connectors. These are nice enough, with a "canoe" section that you push through first, then a long plastic screw which forces the canoe apart and thus fixes the fan in place. Four per fan and it's not going anywhere. The screw is a little fiddly and as it's plastic, be careful not to strip it with a metal screwdriver. The box actually indicates that you can install them without a screwdriver, presumably pushing the screw into the canoe with brute force, but I preferred to screw it in rather than risk bending the thin plastic screw.
One oversight is that the heads of the provided mounting clips seem to be too large. In the Lian Li case at least, if you have two 80mm fans mounted so the bodies are touching, the mounting holes are too close together to allow both to be occupied by the Rainbow LED fan's mounting clips. This is not a big deal but it's a little untidy. You could mount one fan with one side and the other fan with the other, or do what I did and use the case's mounting system on the middle mounting points. You could also trim one edge of the mounting connectors so they fit against each other.
Finally, it's time to fire up the PC. At first I ran the fans from the molex connectors, but later used the 3-pin connectors instead, running them to the Fan Master (review here) in this testbed PC. Interestingly, when the Fan Master is used to slow down the fan, the LEDs dim in brightness. At full speed (which is slightly overvolted, as we discovered in our review here) the LEDs glow slightly more brightly than when connected to the molex's standard 12v. I left them running overnight in this state and they were contentedly blinking and flashing in the morning, so a mild overvoltage doesn't seem to bother them much.
Blinking and flashing? Oh yes. When you fire these fans up, they go through a seemingly-random (but in fact preprogrammed) sequence of colour changes. At first, a pleasant blue and red transition washes over the fan. Then, a frantic flashing of different colours ensues. Actually, I'm not sure if the name is correct for this fan. A rainbow to me is something colourful for sure, but static in its beauty - tranquil and unmoving. This is more like a disco fan or pill-popping raver fan! It's impossible to get the full effect without a video:
There's a party in my PC and everyone's invited! (click for 7MB MOV file)
Note that there's two fans in that video and in the pictures below, but you only get one fan per retail kit. You knew that. You can also see how we know the sequence to be preprogrammed and not random - because both fans follow the same pattern of colour changes, which repeats eventually. They do drift slightly out of sync if you leave them running long enough, but that just adds to the effect.
There's a lot more colour combinations than seen in the pics above, with full-colour and strobing alternate colours. The video gives a much better indication.
These fans also cool your case, which seems almost a side benefit. In fact, they seem to blow only slightly less air than my generic Sunon 80mm fan. According to the box they move 39.5CFM at 32dB-A. I've no doubt one of these fans would serve well in a blowhole or rear exhaust fan. Running two of them has not added significantly to the noise signature of the testbed system, which is dominated by the stock fan on the R9800 Pro video card.
CustomCases list these fans for $18 AUD, which seems very reasonable. It's nice to see a full retail kit with mounting hardware and colour options for the molexes, although I didn't experiment with those. Overall quite a decent package and the fan itself seems to be pretty good quality. If you're looking for something simple to draw attention to your PC, you'd be hard pressed to beat these.
|
|
Advertisement:
All original content copyright James Rolfe.
All rights reserved. No reproduction allowed without written permission.
Interested in advertising on OCAU? Contact us for info.
|
|