Review on 🌈 Corsair iCUE Commander PRO Smart RGB Lighting and Fan Speed Controller: Enhance Performance with Advanced RGB Lighting and Fan Speed Control by Eric Webb

Commander Pro I have about 24 hours. It had its ups and downs, but mostly its ups and downs. Let's start with the good news: Commander Pro has made connecting cables a lot easier for me. I've long been a fan of very clean cable management. Before using Commander I had two separate Silverstone fan hubs (one for intake fans and one for exhaust fans) so each had a PWM cable to the motherboard and a SATA power cable. So, in addition to the 6 cables for my 6 case fans, we had 4 additional cables (two PWM, two power). This was necessary because the fan speed cannot be set individually with simple PWM hubs. These basic hubs can only be configured as a single unit. The Commander Pro with Link can set fan speeds individually, so I didn't need two hubs. Consequently, both PWM cables are gone, replaced by a single internal USB cable, and the two power cables become one. Link (software management system) has a very, very bad reputation. This was my first experience with Link and I was as blind as I could be to avoid preconceived notions. I had some issues with Link but they are far from what was described to me. I'll talk about the issues later and how I fixed them. When Link really worked, it was great. It's too complicated to go into here (I've attached a photo that might help you understand), but I liked the ability to visually organize the fans and give each of them a preset or custom profile, one by one the other. However, the BIG feature for me was the ability to set the case fans to react to GPU temperature, which my motherboard (Crosshair VI Hero) couldn't do. The bottom two air intakes are now GPU responsive and silent when the GPU is idle. This feature will be more useful on a gaming computer that uses an open cooler on its GPU, such as the EVGA FTW. These cards can turn a small case into an oven, allowing you to program Commander Pro to turn on idle exhaust fans when the GPU temperature rises. Initially, however, Link/Commander Pro was rough. While Link was stable for the most part, it couldn't change the fan speed on any curve. By default, the fans seemed to be stuck at 50% or around 700 RPM (just my guess as to how they got to those RPMs). I was able to change the static RPM/% and the fans were responding and the temps were showing correctly, so this was a very strange issue. At this point I tried updating Link and it turned out (as expected) that I had the latest version of Link. I was willing to delete the update there, but turns out there's a separate firmware update elsewhere. I found it and even though the device was only released 3 days ago, it had a firmware update. This was a big improvement and allowed me to set the fan curves, but the link would not go below 50% no matter what percentage I set. The corresponding curve at around 700 rpm was the minimum speed, although the fans responded correctly when the curve told them to exceed this value. Curve successful, to 0 rpm / off. I was worried that this solution would be very weak, but it stayed effective after several reboots, so hopefully it's working fine now. I'm very happy with that at the moment. However, there are areas that can be improved, but these are not disadvantages. First there's the "Commander Pro", ostensibly a device for professionals (workstations etc.) but which also has RGB/LED capabilities that seem to be aimed at gamers. I'm sure this will be welcome to most users, but my computers are 98% designed to work and don't have aesthetic LEDs. Having extra features is certainly nothing to complain about, but I feel like they come at the expense of more fan slots. My CPU's current fans are powered/controlled by the motherboard, which pairs well with Crosshair's excellent PWM control, but perhaps in a large or long-range case, like push-pull, it would be easy to run out of it. I'd rather have 8 fan headers, ideally 10, although that comes at the expense of RGB functionality, at least on "Pro" models. Perhaps this "Pro" model should have a more gamer-friendly name, and a strict workstation model that gets rid of the fun might be released. In any case, despite many setup issues, I'm happy with Commander Pro and recommend it for now, link and all. I will update this as I encounter new issues. As it stands I can only give four stars due to connectivity issues, but maybe my troubleshooting steps will help others.