GUY COCKER, EDITOR-IN-CHIEF

Modular Mayhem

PC building is about slapping ‘brains’ on your components now

I’VE SADLY NOT been at Computex this year, but over in Taiwan, slapping ‘brains’ on all your PC components looks like it’s the theme of the show. Both Corsair and Hyte are launching new smart control systems for PC builders, which will help us keep tabs on everything that’s going on in our systems. That’s alongside full cooling and lighting ecosystems, fans, AIO cooling solutions, and RGB lighting strips to match.

Anyone who has used Corsair gear before will be familiar with its iCue software, but its new link hub and cooling ecosystem will feed case fans into a System Hub—a “brain” that controls everything with one wire. What it means is that you’ll be able to read not just the system’s temperature, but the temperature of each fan individually. It also keeps track of fan speed, and the iCue Link tech means you can jam them all together with proprietary connectors and just one PCIe cable, rather than having cables everywhere.

Hyte’s Nexus Link works similarly in terms of the single cable standard, except its fans also come with the addition of orientation sensors, plus proprietary connections that all link up via magnets, which is pretty nifty. Any seasoned PC builder would say you could just look at your fans to see which way up they are, but hey, the Nexus Link tech means you don’t have to. I also prefer that Hyte is going for universal hardware support with its software, too, so if you have a favorite keyboard that you don’t want to give up, the company won’t make you do so in order to get with the RGB pretties, which is nice of them.