How to Control RGB ELITE and RGB Series Coolers with iCUE

Liquid CPU coolers like the RGB Series or RGB ELITE Series, offer flexibility in terms of lighting and cooling control. Letting you control the lighting and cooling performance of the fans with an ARGB-capable motherboard, or by taking direct control over the lighting and fans using a COMMANDER CORE XT.

Out-of-the-box, an RGB Series or RGB ELITE Series cooler is included with adapter cables so that the lighting and performance of both the pump and fans are controlled by your motherboard ARGB and PWM headers. An iCUE COMMANDER CORE XT (sold separately) is required in order to control the RGB lighting and fan PWM performance with the iCUE software.

Before you start setting up your CORSAIR RGB Series or RGB ELITE Series cooler in iCUE, make sure that the pump cable is connected to your motherboard’s CPU_FAN header, all RGB cables and the PWM cables for your fans should be connected to your COMMANDER CORE XT.

In iCUE, navigate to the COMMANDER CORE XT tile.

Go to lighting setup and iCUE can attempt to autodetect what is connected to the COMMANDER CORE XT or you can manually select what devices are connected to each port that match the number of LEDs.

Note that the pump head for an RGB ELITE Series cooler will be detected as an LL fan due to its LED configuration being identical, this is intended.

Once lighting setup is complete, you can now customize the lighting of your cooler using any of the presets and custom effects available in iCUE.

If you’d like to adjust the cooling performance for the fans, go to “COOLING” and select from any of the available presets or create your own.

Note that the pump performance will not be controlled by iCUE as we recommend connecting the PUMP to the CPU_FAN header on your motherboard for optimal performance.