I was in a conversation with a friend of mine, and he told me about how he had been logged out of NZXT's software, causing his AIO cooler to go wild. Confused, I ask whether he needed to login to adjust his fan curves and alike, and he replied with a simple "yes". Even more confused, I begin to wonder why he can't just go into his UEFI config and set the fan curves there, and after having been told that this AIO didn't use any fan headers, not only was I confused, but more importantly: I was mad.

So, what is NZXT doing exactly?

NZXT uses SATA instead of something like a fan header and USB to control the fans, they also upload images or animations to the AIO cooler using this. This isn't necessarily a bad thing in of itself, however it gets worse the further you dig in. They require you to create an account to use their software, they also require you to upload images and gifs to their cloud to use them on the AIO, they require you to be online to change either of these, and they remove the image and fan curves stored on the AIO when you log out. That's a lot of garbage I mentioned just here, from a pretty short conversation. I haven't yet looked further into this, but I bet it would get worse if I kept looking at weird requirements, or possibly even their privacy policy.

And now what? Why should I care?

Why should you care, you ask? Companies keep getting away with things like this, that's why. We keep letting companies get away with locking basic functionality behind logins, sketchy privacy policies, or the internet in general, when it would be perfectly doable to implement something entirely offline which doesn't require the internet and some proprietary cloud hosting service located in god knows where just to load an image onto a small AIO display. Infact, the community has done this themselves already.

If companies continue to slowly lock everything behind logins and accounts, we might eventually live in a world where we have to obey some stupid policy to change the speed of a fan with more than just this one NZXT cooler. After all, it wouldn't be too crazy to assume that companies will slowly push these practices further, to see how far they can lock you in before they get backlash for doing so.

We should stand against things like this, and companies shouldn't continuously locking software features behind accounts. Especially as we start seeing companies expand this into not only requiring accounts, but also requiring subscriptions to enable some hardware features. (source)

The community and NZXT customization

Luckily you aren't entirely forced to use NZXT's weird software. A community of developers and enthusiasts has made some solutions to these problems already, with extended functionality when compared to NZXT's own official implementation, whilst also being completely open source and (mostly) documented.

An issue that arises from having this kind of setup however is OS Support. Linux and macOS are entirely unsupported by NZXT's software, meaning anyone building Hackintoshes or which likes to use Linux on their main rigs are left with community solutions which are sometimes outdated severely, or require kernel modules.

Conclusion

Overall, I really hope that other companies don't follow with practices like these (if they haven't already), as it takes away a certain degree of freedom to using the device as you see fit, as well as making it harder to use for potentially thousands of people with limited or no internet access. And of course, without support for anything else other than Windows, as mentioned above, MacOS and Linux fall into the water too.

Raspberry Pi moment

not to mention that the display feature is better implemented using a cheap-ish LCD and a Raspberry Pi anyways kekw

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Thanks for reading! I wish you a good rest of the day, evening, night, or whatever other time you're reading this!