So, you’ve filled up the inside of your gaming desktop with enough RGBs for a Las Vegas casino, not to mention tiny little LCD screens on your motherboard, RAM, and liquid cooling reservoir. What’s left? What else could possibly fulfill your desperate need for blinking, flickering excess? One word, you decadent little gamer: holograms.
Well, “holograms,” in quotes. Coolify has apparently put those spinning LED displays—the ones that are a bit flickery and sort of transparent since they’re made with spinning bars—on a PC case fan. PCWorld’s Mark Hachman spotted them at Computex in 2024:
VideoCardz.com spotted that these holographic fans are now available to buy and install in your own desktop. The fans are a standard 120mm size, available in either 1500 or 2600 RPM models. (Since they have to spin at a specific rate in order to generate the images and animations, you can’t vary the speed, at least not without losing the holographic functionality.) It looks like there are 96 LEDs on the bar, which would technically mean the image can only be a circle with a 96-pixel diameter, but the fans can take input for images or animations at up to 300 pixels wide. Not exactly “ultra HD,” as the promo page says.
Coolify
Interestingly, the fans only draw power from your PC, they don’t actually transfer data. You’ll need to load up your images directly to the fans over Wi-Fi using a companion phone app. A bit of a hassle, I suppose, especially if you’re installing multiple fans in your desktop. But I think I’d prefer that to shoddy PC software slowing down my games, if I were the sort of gamer to build a PC like this. (I am not.)
Coolify’s Holo Fan isn’t cheap at $46 a pop, but that’s not horrible considering the unique functionality. Just make sure they’re pointing the right way when you install them.