Going mental with 9 fans...

Okay gang, I'm losing my marbles here with a brand new setup.

I've been using six LL120 fans in the PC I just built. Four of the six LL120s are connected to a Commander Pro, the other two to the H100i Platinum. All six LL120s are connected to an RGB hub, which is channel one on the Commander Pro. Everything worked great.

My motherboard - ASUS Crosshair VIII Hero (X570) has two (count 'em, two!) USB 2.0 headers. The Commander Pro is connected to one, the AIO the other.

That said, I've realized it wasn't going to be enough - all six were set to exhaust, and needed some intake as well. So purchased a three pack of QL120s to use on the bottom of the case - and am having a helluva time getting them to play nice together.

The QL120s came with the RGB Pro vs the "standard" RGB hub that came with the LL120s. Alas I don't have a third USB header to hook them into. Tried hooking them into one of the Commander Pro's USB headers, and its not recognized in icue. Tried buying a USB splitter similar to this one and icue went absolutely bananas. I connected the RGB Pro into it - and icue saw it (hooray!) as well as the H100 - and suddenly icue thought I had two coolers connected, neither of which would actually control the AIO's RGBs or fan performance.

At the moment, I've removed two of the LL120s from the Commander Pro/RGB hub, and connected them directly to the AIO's cables, and connected two of the three QL120s in their place, so at least have those running. However am seeing issues there too - one of the LL120s is now flickering randomly, and am noticing that they're slightly different in colour now (all are set to white, all fans connected to the RGB hub are what I'd call "bright cool white" whereas the two connected to the AIO connectors are more of a "warm" white... not the end of the world, but a wee bit annoying)

I suspect tho, this is a result of me mixing QL and LL fans on the RGB hub.

Anyone got any advice? At the moment, the only potential solution I can think of is to buy another "standard" RGB hub (and cable, since they don't come with it, grrr) to connect the QL fans to (into channel two of the Commander Pro), or keep buying different USB splitters in the hope that one of them doesn't make iCue lose its tiny little mind.

I had a similar problem when trying to use 2 Commander Pro's on my 2 Motherboard USB headers effectively doubling my USB headers but then my Corsair Node Core's were not being recognised within iCUE. I ended up having to use a "NZXT internal USB hub" and it all began to work.

I have no idea why you mention using a channel on your Commander Pro for RGB? I have 10 x QL120's plugged in to 2 Node Core's and I am only using my Commander Pro's lighting channel 1 for my CPU/GPU/XD5 not for any fans. The lighting Node Core's are controlled by USB?

Has my brain died and I can not remember using the lighting channels on my Commander Pro's? Oo No it has not! I am looking at a spare lighting Node Core I have in front of me, there is nowhere you could plug a 3 pin cable to go to a lighting channel on a Commander Pro!!!

copy paste of a post i made just below ^^' you are mistaking two different devices :

the RGB fan hub is a lighting hub that plugs on either the node pro or the commander pro for lighting, using the tiny 3 pin molex, same one found on led strips.

The node core is a standalone version that is roughly equivalent to a node pro and a fan hub all in one (and plugs on USB).. Two completely different ways to connect fans.

I had a similar problem when trying to use 2 Commander Pro's on my 2 Motherboard USB headers effectively doubling my USB headers but then my Corsair Node Core's were not being recognised within iCUE. I ended up having to use a "NZXT internal USB hub" and it all began to work.

Yeah, that's sort of where I am with it. I'd actually tried to get the NZXT one, but they're out of stock everywhere here - with the exception of third party scalpers trying to sell them for $80-100. It's a bit baffling that the Commander Pro's USB hubs seem to be basically useless. (Have read from multiple places that few people if any have any sort of luck using them)

(And yep, the Node Core is the little two connector version where the RGB fan hub plugs into. The Commander Pro basically replaces it and adds fan PWM control, as well as (useless) USB hubs)

Well, got it working. Turns out the USB splitter does work, but the H100i does NOT like it. Plugged the Commander Pro in there along with the Node Pro, running the QL120s off the Commander and the LL120s off the Node Pro. All KIND OF behaving as they should...

Except for one of the LL120s which STILL likes to blink and glitch every 30 seconds or so. It's a different fan than previously though, so am wondering if the RGB hub has a gammy port.

And now its a whole other set of problems. I now have:

6x LL120 fans plugged into their included RGB hub, which is in turn plugged into the Commander Pro.

3x QL120 fans plugged into their included Node Core Pro (connected via USB)

I even took the time to reconnect the fans in order, 1-6 from top left to bottom right in the commander pro, and 7-9 from bottom right to bottom left in the Node Core. Everything was working, as mentioned above. Suddenly, this...

This is with iCue being told to set instant lighting to white. H100i does what its told, the three QL120s do what they're told, memory does what its told, even the K95 and microphone stand DO WHAT THEY'RE TOLD. But now the Commander pro will do what its told for about a half a second, and then change to red.

Oddly, if I turn off instant lighting and turn it back on with another color, they seem to work for a while. But as soon as I choose white, those six fans switch back to red. Might take a minute or two, but they switch back.

Seriously losing patience with all this now. I spent the over the top Corsair premium for all this with the assumption that keeping everything to one ecosystem would make this actually WORK. At this point, I can't BELIEVE that I spent almost $500 on three sets of fans and a Commander Pro only to get completely batsh*t crazy results.

Have you check the rgb connector and the cable between CDP to Hub?

Also you may need to check ur PSU and the way you hookup the sata power cables. White light draw the maximum current according to DevBiker in this post.

can you try to set everything manually to white and dim the lights like 2/3rd down?

I am wondering if there's not like a slight overload with white light as said above.

When things change to red after a while, usually it's the blue LEDs, then the red going off for driver overheat..

It can happen if you daisy chained lots of lighting gear on the same SATA cable.

((I had that happen when testing white on my rig.. dense strips with no heatsinking since they are only stuck with magnets.. i tanned for 2 minutes until they flickered orange, because blue LEDs were overdriven and the green ones were borderline kicking the bucket ^^ HXi told me just the RGB pulled 60W on the 5V rail.. ouchies.. once cooled off, back to normal))

 

6x LL120 fans plugged into their included RGB hub, which is in turn plugged into the Commander Pro.

 

3x QL120 fans plugged into their included Node Core Pro (connected via USB)

 

 

 

This is with iCue being told to set instant lighting to white. H100i does what its told, the three QL120s do what they're told, memory does what its told, even the K95 and microphone stand DO WHAT THEY'RE TOLD. But now the Commander pro will do what its told for about a half a second, and then change to red.

 

Oddly, if I turn off instant lighting and turn it back on with another color, they seem to work for a while. But as soon as I choose white, those six fans switch back to red. Might take a minute or two, but they switch back.

Can you trying turning the LEDs off (black) on all other devices except the Commander, then test the 6 LL alone for white, red (255/0/0/0), blue, and green? Pure white system wide with LL/QL and a lot of devices will use a large chunk of 5v current. It might be good to separate the Commander/RGB Hub/LL fans ability to produce white from the rest of the system vs some type of problem with blue/green RGBs at full white vs something else.

60w for LEDS?!?!? Jesus wept...

The only things currently on my SATA cables are the LEDs - no optical devices, and my hard drives are M.2. I'll give it a try when I get back to it.

Frightening eh? :)

Remember that one white dot on your fan is 3 high brightness LEDs, one per primary color.

one QL fan is 34 of these.. 34 "logical" LEDs, 102 LEDs per fan.. 3 fans, 918 bright dies sucking up juice on your 5V rail :) It adds up fast, so it's worth splitting the load on different SATA cables on the PSU.

Voltage drops very fast on 5V. the blue LEDs have the highest forward voltage, then green then red.

So as load increases, blue goes first, then green.. you end up with just red if it's a big overload.

Yeah, had a think about it after the fact and well... makes sense. 102 per fan, so 612 LEDs each of which is sucking about 0.1 watts each.. yeah, that's 60w right there, and SATA is rated for something like 55w.

And sure enough, dropping the brightness to about 70% and haven't had an issue since.

In fact, dare I say it... can't say I've noticed the previous flickering issue now either.

So fair play for the recommendation!

Crosshair X570 Hero here, with an AMD 5900X. Wasn't experiencing issues at all (occasionally I needed to open iCue to remind the commander pro to get the fans out of default rainbow mode and into static color) until upgrading to iCue 4. Now all nine of my fans look like unicorns in a blender, and I have no way of changing them since iCue no longer sees them.

GREAT JOB, GUYS!!!