What are Daisy Chain PC Fans? (and why iCUE LINK fans are better)

Historically speaking, each and every fan you’d install into a PC would have its own cable that would plug directly into your motherboard. So, if your motherboard only had four fan headers, your PC would only have four case fans. When RGB lighting became almost as ubiquitous as the fans themselves, this added yet another cable just to control those lights. This made the fans of all things the most annoying part of a PC build.

As usual, when PC enthusiasts were faced with this limitation, they found hacky and eventually good solutions: fan splitters, fan hubs, and RGB controllers. Of course, these weren’t really solutions as they only alleviated the wiring problem instead of creating a proper solution. The apparent solution came with the advent of daisy chainable fans.

But what are daisy chainable fans? Well, we’re going to tell you what they are, how they work, and most importantly, (according to my boss) why CORSAIR iCUE LINK fans, are not daisy chain fans, but are in fact a complete solution.

Fans are not randomly dotted around a PC case, aside from custom builds and some very small cases, they are positioned in contiguous columns.

Taking a regular ATX PC case as an example, you almost always find a row of two or three fans in the front, and the same up top. After all, positioning the fans in a line makes sense as it saves space and creates a veritable wall of air to cool your precious PC components.

But if most of the fans in a PC are right next to each other, cables coming from each individual fan seems like overkill. Why not take advantage of the fan’s proximity to each other and connect them together, then terminate with a single cable at the end of the stack? It’s a good point, and this is exactly how daisy chainable fans work.

There are contacts on each fan that connect when the fans are installed in a stack. These carry the power and control signals from fan to fan, allowing you to monitor and adjust the speed and the lighting. Then you only need to manage a single cable from one of the fans at the end. It’s a nice idea and definitely cuts down on cable management.

This of course makes for a tidier back panel and an easier build overall. However, this creates an inherent limitation: Every stack is seen by the PC as a single fan, so every fan in that stack must invariably act identically. CORSAIR iCUE LINK fans by comparison, are not subject to this limitation as they are not daisy chainable fans.

Like the daisy chained fans we were just on about, iCUE LINK fans connect together and terminate with a single cable at the end of the stack to the System Hub. This is where the similarities end, however, as each iCUE LINK FAN in the stack can behave individually.

This goes for lighting, speed, and even monitoring, as every QX fan has its own temperature sensor. This allows for the most granular control and temperature monitoring available outside of jamming third party temperature sensors all over the inside of your PC.

Ultimately, this means that iCUE LINK fans have all the advantages of daisy chainable fans, without any of the shortcomings. You get the effortless cable management like daisy chaining, with the individualised control that comes from manually wiring each fan to the motherboard.

If the best of both worlds is an appealing concept, check out our iCUE LINK ecosystem at our main website. The fans of course are the most appealing, but we’ve given almost every PC part the iCUE LINK treatment at this point. Meaning that AIOs, pump reservoirs, and waterblocks need not compromise the cable mess iCUE LINK worked so hard to solve.