Take Control With Corsair Commander Pro

 There's little doubt that custom lighting and cooling has become a significant part of the PC enthusiast culture and Corsair is no shrinking violet in this market and one of their latest offerings is the Commander Pro. Marketed as "the heart of your Corsair Link system" this appears to be a direct replacement for the now discontinued Corsair Commander Mini, it's a centralized control center for controlling and monitoring your RGB fans and strips, controlling fan speeds and monitoring temperatures.

Opening the packaging, things are tidy and well-presented, as we've come to expect from Corsair.

Inside the box is the Commander unit, four 4-pin fan extensions, two RGB hub cables, four thermistors and two pieces of 2-sided tape used to mount the Commander in your case. The Commander Pro has six 4-pin fan connectors with voltage and PWM control, four thermistor inputs, two RGB lighting channels and two USB 2.0 internal headers. Each lighting channel can control up to four lighting strips or six fans but controlling fan lighting requires an LED hub (not included). The Commander Pro plugs into an internal USB header and uses SATA for power.

To wrangle all of this hardware you're going to use the Corsair Link software. From there you can customize the color and effects of your lighting, the behavior of your fans and monitor the temperatures of your CPU, GPU, hard drives, motherboard sensors as well as up to 4 locations you can choose with the included thermistors.

All in all the Commander Pro is a handy little gadget and a must-get if you're stacking Corsair RGB products in your case but it's not all sunshine and rainbows. As I said earlier, to customize the fan lighting you need to purchase an additional device. Additionally, I would have liked more than four light strips per channel. If you're lighting a large case, this limitation could be problematic.

The Corsair Commander pro sells for 69.99 and is available at online retailers like Amazon,m Newegg and the Corsair store.