Maingear’s coolest CES announcement concerns water cooling. The company has added RGB to its Apex integrated cooling system, dubbing it Apex Spectrum. It uses an addressable LED controller to connect directly to motherboards and can be controlled by software. For now, Apex Spectrum is only available on Maingear’s F131 Superstock and the new limited-run Rush Omega Edition desktop.
Maingear tells me that it went with a controller that goes direct to the motherboard to avoid ecosystem lock-in. I was told that it works with every RGB standard, though it was demoed for me using Asus Aura Sync.
The company wouldn’t describe the engineering behind it, but it’s definitely integrated in the tube, and you can slightly see some LEDs from the right angles.
And I’ll say this: it looks awesome. I saw it in an all-rainbow configuration in the F131, but in a more muted purple in the Rush Omega Edition, which made for a classier, more subtle look. And if you change your mind, you can always make it more or less vibrant with software.
Right now, Apex Spectrum only work with the company’s hardline Apex cooling, and there’s no word about if it will eventually come to softline models or if you’ll see it outside of Maingear’s system.
The Rush Omega Edition, one of the two desktops that currently support Apex Spectrum, is a limited run desktop with RTX graphics cards, Intel's top end Core i9 CPUs, up to 64GB of RAM, Apex cooling (including failsafe dual pumps, pressure regulated parallel cooling, temperature sensing and more) and will be available in a mindnight slate color starting at $9,999.
