CORSAIR iCUE COMMANDER CORE XT, Digital Fan Speed and RGB Lighting Controller

CORSAIR iCUE COMMANDER CORE XT. I rarely write reviews because so many others do so. However, I am so impressed with this little device I just had to. For Christmas, I received a new Corsair 4000X RGB PC case in white along with an extra set of three Corsair RGB fans to fill out the case. So I moved the "guts" of my old PC into its new case. I then needed to purchase a fan/RGB controller for the six fans I now had. 15 connections needed to be made. Six PWM fan, six RGB, two temperature probes and one SATA power connection. The back of the body is magnetized and attaches neatly to the wire tray. After downloading and installing the software from the Corsair site, I ran the program. It is fairly intuitive and after a while I had all my fans and RGB set pretty much the way I wanted. There's a lot to play with here. Then I started to "look around" to see what other features the Commander XT had to offer. WOW! I never thought a fan/RGB controller would offer so much PC monitoring information! Setting up the "Dashboard", you click on the 4 tile icon near the upper right corner of the screen. Then turn on everything you want to monitor. Not only can you monitor and adjust the case fans but the two temperature probes show the temps of the air at the positions you installed them. I can now see the intake and exhaust temps. I can look at my Processor, DRAM, Motherboard, GPU and HDD/SSD items showing temps and processes. All this from a fan/RGB controller?!?! WOW! Corsair really hit it out of the park with this device. I cannot find anything to dislike about this device. Just BUY IT!

Connected 12 120 fans and 4 140 fans works perfectly Gpu and Cpu temp sensor works great on Gigabyte motherboard and sapphire pulse 7900XTX Gpu. Very happy that I bought the product.

I have the SP 120 high performance fans, which are great fans overall. Out of the box, though, their speed cannot be controlled at all - unless you hook them up to your motherboard, and leave them at the mercy of your motherboard's proprietary software. I tried that and trust me, it's not ideal. Also, I hated having to reach into my case for the included RGB controller. Sure, I could've mounted that outside of my case, but making that work with my case would be nothing short of a pain. Thankfully, the Commander Pro solves both of these problems. It allowed me to quiet my PC down SIGNIFICANTLY - I use the "quiet" fan speed mode, and I can barely hear the fans at all. Even when gaming, the PC is very quiet, contrary to before I had the controller, when the fans were running loud all the time - even at idle. This is a must-have if you care about acoustics, or for that matter, not wasting electricity, especially given the power-hungry nature of gaming PCs. And I'm not noticing any increase in temps of my CPU or graphics card. I love being able to adjust the RGB settings right within the Link software. I saw several complaints about this software, but it works flawlessly from my experience - and it looks way nicer than software for my other hardware.Now, the only reason I gave this product 5 stars is because it works so well. I think it's absolutely ridiculous, as you'll see in my photo, there are two boxes - the RGB controller, then the Commander Pro. Why couldn't the functionality be combined into one box? This is really messy on Corsair's end, and makes for a ton of extra cables. There's gotta be some way this could be made more streamlined. Also, $60 for this? That seems a bit high.But in the end, despite these issues, the Commander Pro has worked wonders for my PC, quieting it down by a huge margin. If you have Corsair SP or HP fans, I recommend getting this.

Recent PC builds have trended to more internal devices that need a USB header from your motherboard and this can quickly get out of hand. I just did a combination of a Corsair H80i AIO water loop for my CPU and an EKWB system for my GPUs. Each needs a USB header, my case had a controller needing a USB header, and then--oh yeah--I'm supposed to use those USB headers for actual USB.The Corsair iCue Commander Pro controller has been a huge help. It's also been a huge pain to figure out, but once I got it all put together and working, it's been everything I needed. I'm also using it to control the RGB on three iCue fans and even a daisy-chain of Corsair RGB lighting strips, just for fun. There's no easy-to-understand PDF of all these parts, so let me walk you through it:- The Commander Pro on its own plugs into a USB header on your motherboard and gives you two more USB headers to connect other devices. It uses iCUE software to control the way anything connected to it behaves.Even though Corsair's coolers (like the H80i v2) use a USB header *and* are iCUE compatible, they will NOT work when connected to the Commander Pro. You still have to have them directly connected to a USB header on your motherboard (per Corsair tech support). Trying to use the Commander Pro to control this Corsair product broke it and I had to get an RMA and replace the H80i v2.- The Commander Pro also has four sensors you can string through your case and monitor temperatures at various points. Corsair does not recommend putting them in hot spots--for example, it's okay to put one next to the CPU or GPU, but not to but them on the cooling surface like other sensors might be used. The intention is more that you'd check case temperatures at certain spots.If you just want fans and sensors, you can stop here. If you have RGB lighting, however...- The lighting controller doesn't actually work directly with Corsair iCUE RGB fans. I had to connect a Lighting Node Pro to the Commander (per Corsair tech support) in order to get my fans' RGB to show up and be configurable. I could use the lighting controller for lighting strips, just not the fans. Thankfully these tend to be sold with the fans, it was just very confusing that this redundancy was needed.- The terminology is confusing - while talking to tech support we had to keep straight "The Lighting Node", "the Commander Pro", and "The Lighting Node Pro" to talk about which part needed to be connected to which.- In the end, if you're going to use the Commander Pro, RGB fans, and lighting strips, you're going to be buying three separate packages and you'll have extra controllers you don't need.I'm glad the system works as well as it does, and I'm really impressed with how closely I can tweak every last little aspect of every fan and cooler in my case using the iCue software. I can make profiles specific to demanding programs or games and I can have it run in 'quiet' mode when I'm just doing everyday computing. This software is the best I've used and much better than Speedfan or ASUS GPUTweak.That said, Corsair should bundle these items correctly so people can buy the specific solution they need. They should provide documentation--there is no PDF and the website is just one page about how to plug the fans into the controller. For any other tasks, you need to go searching for that specific page, again and again.Last, it's disappointing that the Commander Pro broke my H80i v2. The documentation should tell you what Corsair products DO and DO NOT work with the Commander Pro. This is why I give it 3 stars for "easy to install" and "easy to use".