GoKawiilSo many PC cooling companies copy each other’s designs and features – I must have seen a dozen AIOs at Computex with curved screens and / or unified fans. But at Levelplay’s event last week, I was struck by a couple of concepts the company is working on. First was the MagBracket fan design, where the RGB lights are housed in a mounting plate, which connects via a USB-C cable that unifies PWM and RGB connections.
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)
This allows the fans themselves to connect magnetically to the plate, and electrically via pogo pins. Drop them on the powered plate, and the fan lights up as it begins to spin. That would make cleaning your case fans exceptionally easy, and it also means the spinners are reversible, with connectors on both sides. So you can pop a fan off, flip it over, and put it back on to go from intake to exhaust.
That also means you can install the brackets on their own, and pop the fans on after your system is more or less built. Anyone who’s ever put a fan on a radiator or case in the wrong orientation (that has to be everyone who’s built more than one PC, right?) can rejoice at how easy that situation would be to fix here. Grab the offending fan, flip it over, pop it back on, and you’re good to you. You wouldn’t even need to reboot.
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(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)
We don’t know pricing or availability yet, and the orange crossbars probably aren’t doing the airflow any favors. But I love the simple modularity of this design.
(Image credit: Tom's Hardware)
Next up, the Newtro 360 is a retro-styled cooler that puts a big tactile knob on top of an AIO, letting you adjust the fan speed, with a max cooling rating of 350W.
It’s certainly a more unique take than adding a screen or a VRM fan on top of the cold plate, but I’m personally not certain how often I’d be willing to pop my side panel off to tweak my AIO’s performance. I do like the orange accents on the sleeved cables and the old-school metal fan grilles, though.
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