Options for fan control

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Joined
31 Jan 2006
Posts
22
This is purely a vanity project to do something I wanted to do when I was much younger but couldn't afford to then.

I've presently got:
  • MSI Z390-A PRO ATX LGA1151 motherboard
  • i7 9700K
  • Patriot Viper Steel 16 GB (2 x 8 GB) DDR4-3200 CL16 memory
  • Intel 660p Series 2.048 TB M.2-2280 NVME SSD
  • MSI 3080 Ti Suprim X
  • ADX Power W750 Modular ATX PSU
  • Cooler Master Stacker 830 case
The case is way too big. I want to make the following changes:
  • Lian Li PC-O11 Dynamic case in black
  • NZXT Kraken X73 AIO 360mm
  • Lian Li O11D-1 vertical GPU mount kit (I'm aware this is PCI-E 3.0 only - my board only supports that)
  • Some RGB fans - ideally 3 on the bottom, 3 on the top - I realise the mount may be an issue with this
  • PSU 'extension' cables that look nicer than the basic black I've currently got. Alternatively a replacement PSU if it's cheaper to achieve something nicer looking - by which I mean uniform, tidy, not tangled. I don't care about lights on these.
Some questions that I got stuck on and I hoped folks could help with please:
  • With the vertical GPU mount, are all the fan positions on the bottom unusable? Is there a different/better mount that I should be getting which allows fans to be used in these, but still doesn't have the card too close to the window?
  • In the future can I swap out the PCI-E cable for a 4.0 one?
  • How can I control the fan colours? I saw options for fan controllers, internal USB hubs, etc. but this is way beyond anything available when I last considered what my PC looks like. Is anyone able to recommend something for this purpose please?
  • Can you recommend any 120mm RGB fans to work with this?
  • Are there any incompatibilities here that I've not thought of? Any missing requirements?
I'm not particularly price sensitive, as evidenced by this project which by all accounts is completely unnecessary and stands to gain me nothing more than something pretty looking.

Any advice would be much appreciated.
 
Thanks, however I am picking the cooler based purely on aesthetics and I'm not particularly fond of how that Arctic Freezer II looks - performance is kind of irrelevant in my case as my current air cooler does just fine and I'm not overclocking.

The main thing I am trying to understand is how I can control the RGB fans. For example on the NZXT site they have this fan controller and this internal USB hub - if I use both of these does that make the fans controllable via Windows? If I'm going to get other coloured fans do they need to be NZXT ones? Can they be daisy-chained or will each fan take up one channel/port on the controller?
 
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