If everything is correct, you can turn them on and marvel at their splendour. Once your fans are in place and everything is cabled up, there’s one last task: make sure no wires are poking into the fans when you turn them on, as this is a good way to slice up your cables. Ultimately, I changed the orientation of the fans, ensuring my case’s airflow worked as it did before but hiding some of the RGB lighting. I had planned to have the fans mounted at the front and facing inwards, but that made the fans exhausts instead of intakes. Note that the RGB lighting is on one side only, so you may need to change your case’s airflow if you want the lighting to be easily visible from one side. Once everything is connected, you’re ready to actually place your fans within your case (if you haven’t done this already). Thankfully, the Manta case we’re using does have a lot of extra internal space to play with and the cables are quite thin, so it’s not the end of the world. Again, there’s no groove to route the cables on the fans, so these cables also have to sit somewhere outside. (This means there’s one slot left on the Hue+ you can use for something else, e.g. Basically, you have to run cables from the Hue+ to your first fan, then from the first fan to the second fan, and so on until all of your fans are connected. I opted to put the power connectors on the same side of my case as my motherboard, keeping them out of sight. Normally there’s an inset area on each corner that allows you to route the cables easily, but the completely cuboid shape of the Aer fans means that you need a little extra space along the outside for your cables to run. Next, you have to hook up the four-pin power connectors for each fan. The lesson here is this: make sure you have a spare USB 2.0 header on your motherboard, and get an expansion board like the one linked above if you don’t. Once that arrived (thanks, Amazon same day delivery), I was ready to connect the Kraken and Hue’s USB headers to the expansion board, mount that in the PC, and finally plug that into the motherboard.

I didn’t have a spare connector on my my motherboard - it was already used by my NZXT Kraken X61, go figure - and so I ended up needing to buy an NZXT Internal USB Expansion for £15. There’s a Molex power cable that plugs into the Hue+ - no worries there - and also a Micro USB to USB header cable. The obligatory internal USB 2.0 expansion Aer RGB140 & HUE+: 2 x Aer RGB140 with HUE+ Controller - £89.99.Aer RGB120 & HUE+: 2 x Aer RGB120 with HUE+ Controller - £74.99.Here’s a breakdown of the UK prices (all inclusive of VAT): You can get the Aer RGB in various configurations with and without the HUE+ controller, which is needed for the fans to operate. Therefore, if you’re mounting them in the front of your case, if you want to see them from the side window they will be exhaust fans if you want to see them from the front they will be intake fans. The Aer RGB has a nine blade design, as you would expect, and will suck air from the side with the LED ring, and push air towards the NZXT sticker side. The fans have a coloured band of LEDs running around the periphery of the fan. We’re looking at the 140mm versions here. The AER RGB fans are available in 120mm and 140mm sizes. Internet connection is needed to download CAM HUE+ is sold separately and is required to unlock Aer RGB’s full lighting features. However, after the fiddly installation is completed, you’ll be glad you went through the effort. For the Aer RGB, that’s wiring complexity and a free internal USB 2.0 header. These colourful fans look great and perform well too, but everything comes at a cost. Once rigged up, the fans promise excellent cooling, minimal noise and gorgeous lighting effects. They are called the Aer RGB, and they work with the same NZXT Hue+ controller and CAM software that we loved earlier this year. Today we’re looking at some colourful PC case fans from NZXT.

Nzxt aer rgb 2 140 mm