NZXT's doing something that makes so much damned sense I don't know why it's not been done before

NZXT is doing something new with PC case fans, something no-one is doing, and that seems to be as exciting for the company as it is terrifying. «In the fan market, there's a lot there's a lot of talk of like magnetic fans and fans that are clickable together,» CEO Johnny Hou tells me. «So we're like, well, if you really want, if you really care about the fans being connected, why don't we just make them all together?»

If you look around at the likes of Lian Li, Corsair, Thermaltake, and MSI, all of them are creating new case fan systems that link several fans together to make up a solid lump of spinning airflow. It's useful for mounting on AIO water coolers, or big front panels of chassis, or basically anywhere you need more than one 120mm fan.

And it makes sense. You take away the hassle of extra cabling, because the magnetic connections often also carry power through to the next one in a daisy chain, and it makes them more straightforward to install into your PC. Win, win. But you do still need to screw in each corner of each fan or you could have the middle of a three, for example, flopping out and breaking the connection, powering down those either side. And you don't want that.

But what if there was a better way? Like manufacturing them so that you had the common configurations of fans already in one block? Which is exactly what NZXT is doing with its F Series RGB Core fans: It's manufacturing single, dual, and triple fan arrays, and multiple different sizes (240, 280, and 360mm), to cater to all sorts of cases and coolers. And they all need the same number of screws: Four.

«If you think about it,» says Hou, «like first of all, there are a lot of costs in those magnets and connectors, and you still have to connect them up. You still have screws you have to do.

»The issue is that in the fan market, basically zero percent of the fans are unibody. So like, we are putting it on all our cases and everything. So internally there was a lot of—and there still is—a lot