Lian Li shines a brighter light with the STRIMMER PLUS

This year during CES, one of the suites that I was able to spend a considerable amount of time in was Lian Li. The company had brought a host of products, from ready-to-ship cases to prototype fans. Out of everything that was shown off, the STRIMMER PLUS easily had the brightest future.

All puns and Dad jokes aside, we always welcome the unusual around here. For those of you that aren’t up to date on what even the STRIMMER PLUS is, allow me to explain. The STRIMMER PLUS is a system of RGB LED cable extensions. It’s an update to the original STRIMMER that was released a few years back.

New to the STRIMMER PLUS is addition of a dual 6+2 8pin PCIe cables. The two cables come as a set and work just like the larger 24pin cable set.

The STRIMMER PLUS is an upgrade to the original STRUMMER in a number of ways. The most prominent would be the LED wires themselves. In the original version, the wires were just left exposed on all sides which gave the appearance of a light-up wire sitting on top of the power cables. In the new STRIMMER PLUS, the LED wires have been given sides, a concave underside. and paired off. This does a few things. Giving the LED wires sides and pairing them off gives the look of complete extension cables rather than the floating look of the first generation. The same goes for adding concave indentations to run the sleeved power cables. It all adds to the cohesive feel as it makes the cables look like one set of cables that light up instead of some lights added to the top of your PSU cables.

Previously, the STRIMMER used a rear-accessible PCI slot cover with a few buttons to control the lighting. With this upgraded version, the STRIMMER PLUS now hosts a break-out box of sorts. This controller box allows you to plug in the cables that come from the extensions and either control the lighting from the box itself or plug into an RGB header on your motherboard and use your computer’s RGB management software to handle the color lights and effects. While the physical buttons of the older versions are nice, I’m sure it’ll be much easier to deal with software lighting control. The controller only comes with the 24pin cable.

Surprisingly, the 24-pin cable is much shorter than the 8-pin. While both have adequate length, the 8pin comes in a full 100mm longer at 300mm for the cables. The end connectors make up the difference in length by a little. The 24pin is 273mm in total while the 8pin is 364mm long.

While the available colors of the 120 LEDs in the 24pin ( 108 LEDs in the 8pin cable) cable aren’t the full gamut of the RGB spectrum, there are some very interesting animations modes that were noted including the “Snooker” and “Cha Cha” I have no idea what either of these mean in terms of light animations, but I’m very interested to find out.

Both are available now from Newegg and other online retailers. The 24pin is retailing for $49.99 while the 8pin is available for $39.99.

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