Slay the Cables: Corsair’s iCUE Link Is a Brilliant Cleanup Job for PC DIY Building

pcmag.com:

We were especially looking forward to seeing Corsair’s suite at Computex 2023 because during CES 2023, we got a sneak peek at Corsair’s long-in-development iCUE Link hardware under wraps, and were eager to see more. We couldn’t talk about them back during CES, but the products are now likely to live in the wish lists of thousands of PC builders before and after their June 27th launch.

The concept behind iCUE Link is simple: Make PC fans, coolers, and eventually other gear easy to connect in series. The goal is to eliminate the need for sprawling masses of cables that make cable routing a nightmare and the least favorite part of assembling a PC. If you can snap together a series of fans, connect that with a short cable to another series of fans, and have your CPU cooler in that chain somewhere, you can eliminate a lot of cable mess and only run cables where they really need to be.

That's Corsair’s aim for iCUE Link, and it now has a host of products that make use of this new design. Let’s take a look at some of Corsair’s new AIO coolers and fans to see how this design works.

As you can see in the photo, these RGB-capable fans do not have any cables hanging off of each them; ordinarily, you would have a PWM fan control cable and a separate RGB cable. Instead, they have special proprietary edge connectors that enable adjacent fans to snap together. This would apply for standalone case fans mounted in series, or for the fans on a 240mm or 360mm water cooler.

Then, with a group of side-by-side fans connected, you need to run only one cable from one of the fans and connect it to a Corsair iCUE Link System Hub, which works as a controller managing the fan speed and lights, or to more iCUE Link-compatible fans or coolers in a