Cooling Devices

Nexus controls cooling hardware at two levels: fans on your motherboard's headers, and USB cooling devices - AIO coolers and fan hubs - that it drives natively with its own first-party drivers. Both kinds appear together on the Cooling page as fan and pump channels, so one set of curves and presets covers the whole system. Fan and pump control always goes through Nexus's own drivers; the bundled OpenRGB layer only adds third-party lighting coverage.

1. Motherboard fans

Fans plugged into motherboard headers are detected through the platform sensor layer and show up as individual fan cards. Whether a header is controllable depends on your board; running calibration tells you which channels respond, which are fixed-speed, and what each fan's real RPM range is.

2. Natively driven AIOs and hubs

These first-party device families are driven directly by Nexus. Devices from one hub or cooler are grouped under the device's name in the fan list, and the control mode (software, motherboard passthrough, or onboard firmware, where the hardware offers them) is set per device.

  • HYTE - THICC Q60 and Q80 AIO coolers (both pump and radiator fans are controllable channels, and their LCD screens are driven by Nexus too), plus the Nexus Portal NP50, Smart Hub, and MiniHub fan hubs.
  • Lian Li - Galahad II Trinity and Galahad II Performance AIOs (fan and pump channels), the Uni Fan hub family (Uni Hub, SL, AL, TL, SL v2, AL v2, SL-Infinity), the L-Wireless wireless fan kit, and the SL-LCD / TL-LCD fan screens.
  • Corsair - the iCUE LINK System Hub and the iCUE LINK LCD and XD5 Elite LCD pumps. Temperature probes on the LINK chain (fan probes, liquid loops, pump blocks) are exposed as curve input sources, so a curve can follow your coolant temperature.
  • Tryx - the Panorama AIO family (Panorama, Panorama SE, Panorama WaterBlock, Panorama v2), including their screens.

The full, searchable catalog - including the much larger third-party RGB list - lives on the devices page. Inside the app, the Supported Devices list shows the same catalog and highlights what is plugged into your system right now. For lighting support specifically, see Supported Devices.

Note

Only one program should control a cooling device at a time. If a vendor's own tool is driving the hub or AIO, Nexus's writes will fight with it - close the other tool's control of that device, or leave the device to it. See Other RGB & Fan Software.

3. If a device is missing

A cooling device that does not show up on the Cooling page is usually behind another program holding it, or a USB connection issue. Work through Device Not Detected. Once a device is detected, System Diagnostics watches its fans and pump for stalls.